For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;
(2 Peter 2:4-5) KJV
Noah spent about 100 years building the ark. He preached to the people of his day to warn them about the impending flood. He thought that he was building the ark to save people. They thought that he was off his rocker.
Many people today believe that there had never been rain on the Earth because of a Biblical reference to the surface being watered by a mist which rose up from the ground. Supposedly this was the reason why the people of Noah’s day thought he was crazy: there had never been any rain, so why would there be? This interpretation isn’t necessary.
The context of the mist is during the process of creation, when the fountains of the great deep were sealed shut, not after it. For all we know there could have been abundant rain and people would still have thought that Noah was crazy, for the same reason for why people ignore the warnings of preachers today.
During the time that Noah was building the ark hell was continuing to expand, heating the waters of the great deep and increasing pressure in the interior of the Earth. It’s entirely possible that this caused atmospheric conditions to change. There may well have been an increase in storms and damaging weather which added urgency to Noah’s preaching. The people still thought that he was nuts.
Noah’s flood is frequently referred to as the deluge, and that’s where we get one of the words which has been used to refer to history before the flood: antediluvian (ante– before, –diluvian deluge). Another word that we need to know is Noachian, which refers to things which are of the flood. An example of its usage would be in referring to the sediment that was deposited during the flood. Science calls this the stratigraphic column from the Cambrian through the Quaternary. It makes no sense to use those terms in Matty’s Paradigm so the same sequence of strata can be referred to as Noachian.
Matty's Paradigm 