The Flood: Myth and Science
The generally accepted explanation of the story of the Flood is that it told of a local event experienced by ancient Sumerians who spread the tale by diffusion to the surrounding cultures.
"In 1929, the English archaeologist Sir Charles Woolley reported finding water-deposited layers as much as ten feet thick in excavations near the Euphrates..."
- Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, (1981) pp. 153-154
"...Evidence of a major flood just over 6,000 years ago has been found around Ur, where a layer of water-laid clay two and a half meters deep covers an area of more than 100,000 square kilometers. This amounts to a spread across the entire width of the Tigris-Euphrates valley from north of modern Baghdad to the coast of the Persian Gulf in what now includes parts of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait."
- Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus
"...Sumerian records speak of events as happening 'before the Flood' and 'since the Flood.' [This was later dated to about 2800 B.C.]
"Naturally, a particularly bad flood would destroy records, especially in a primitive situation where writing had, at best, barely come into use. For that reason, events 'before the Flood' would quickly take on a legendary and, very likely, highly exaggerated nature. The Sumerians listed kings who reigned for tens of thousands of years before the Flood; they made no such reports of kings who reigned after the Flood. And, of course, this reflected itself in the ages given of the antediluvian patriarchs in the Bible."
- Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, (1981) pp. 153-154
"All in all, then, from the purely geologic point of view we should expect independent flood traditions to have arisen almost anywhere in the world at almost any time, engendered by flood catastrophes stemming from perfectly natural causes, and of all the possible causes of floods, only tsunamis are capable of giving rise to flood legends in widely separated places at the same time."
- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (1976) p. 150
For example the Greek myth of Deukalion's flood most likely originated in the tsunami created by the eruption of Thera in the 17th c. B.C.E.
"Later versions of the Deukalion story include details that closely parallel the Hebrew-Babylonian flood story. In the course of time the sea flood became nine days and nights of rain, the chest became an ark, animals were included in the passenger list, and Deukalion sent out a dove on successive occasions to see if the waters had receded.... Thus the traditions of two different places, based on floods centuries apart, merged into what is essentially the same story.... There is considerable lack of agreement concerning Deukalion and the characters associated with other Greek flood traditions."
- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (1976) p. 160
Parallels with the Hebrew-Babylonian flood story in legends told by South Sea Islanders or North American Indians may be attributed to contact with Christian missionaries.
".... there is no sign of.... a universal deluge in the third millennium B.C. Egyptian history, for instance, carries right through the entire third millennium B.C. without any sign of a break or any mention of a flood."
- Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, (1981) p. 165
"Flood traditions are lacking in semi-arid Central Asia, which is hardly surprising...."
"The only legend from southern Africa involving any sort of inundation is not a typical deluge tradition at all, but one which seeks to explain the origin of a particular lake.... This tale was collected by Livingstone, and was the only one he encountered in all his years of missionary work which had any resemblance to a flood tradition."
- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (1976) pp. 163-164
Was the Flood story based a local inundation in Sumer or was there another source that may have more global implications? The most likely candidates are rising sea levels and catastrophic local flooding at the end of the last glacial period.
(2) The Ice Ages
"Many glacial advances and retreats have occurred during the last billion years of Earth history. These glaciations are not randomly distributed in time. Instead, they are concentrated into four time intervals. Large, important glaciations occurred during the late Proterozoic (between about 800 and 600 million years ago), during the Pennsylvanian and Permian (between about 350 and 250 million years ago), and the late Neogene to Quaternary (the last 4 million years). Somewhat less extensive glaciations occurred during parts of the Ordovician and Silurian (between about 460 and 430 million years ago).
"During each of these periods, many glacial advances and retreats occurred. For example, over 20 glacial advances and retreats have occurred during the last 2 million years [the beginning of the Quaternary period]."
- Ice Ages, Illinois State University.
In 1912 Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitc speculated that the ice ages were caused by the cyclical change in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit every 100,000 years. This effects the earth's distance from the sun and consequently the amount of sunlight hitting the surface of the earth (by a small amount).
In addition, the Earth also slowly tilts in and out of the plane of its fixed orbit every 100,000 years. Researchers Richard A. Muller of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and Gordon J. MacDonald of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria speculate that this causes the earth to periodically run into extraterrestrial debris which can result in climatic variations.
In their Science paper, Muller and MacDonald "applied a technique called spectral analysis to ocean sediments taken from eight locations around the world, examining the oxygen-18 composition. This isotope is generally accepted to reflect the percentage of the Earth's water frozen in ice."
The spectral fingerprints "of the ice ages show a single dominant feature, a peak with a period of 100,000 years. This precisely matches their theory. The fingerprints do not match the expected trio of peaks predicted by the Milankovitch theory.
"Said Muller, 'The mechanism proposed by Milankovitch could be adjusted to explain the cycles of glaciation that occurred prior to one million years ago. However, for the past million years the glacial record is an excellent match to the cycle of tilt.'"
- Jeffery Kahn, "Astronomical Theory Offers New Explanation For Ice Age" (July 11, 1997)
"In the last glacial cycle, which peaked about 18,000 years ago, glaciers covered virtually all of Antarctica, Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia, much of northern United States, northern Europe and Britain, and parts of Siberia and Alaska. Glaciers became much more extensive than today in the Alps, Pyrenees, Urals, Himalayas, Rockies, and Andes mountains. They formed on the Hawaiian volcanoes and on some tropical African volcanoes, which are today ice free. Sea level dropped by up to 350 feet."
- Alan Feuerbacher , "Summary of Ice Age Events"
"In June 1993, the new Greenland ice core revealed a climate whose dynamism has startled researchers. Evidence indicates that the Younger Dryas began and ended very abruptly. The last ice age ended about 15,000 years ago and warmer temperatures reined. Then 2,000 years later, the climate chilled again, dropping 7 degrees C in the Younger Dryas. Then it appears that the Earth switched very rapidly, perhaps in as little as three years, to the relatively warm conditions we have today. If the evidence of these swings is accurate, the swings may reflect massive shifts in ocean and atmospheric circulation."
- Ice Core Yields Unique Climate Archive
"13,000 years ago tremendous quantities of water were still trapped in polar ice caps and the oceans rose about 120 meters to their present level. The global sea level generally rose at a rate of two or three centimeters a year compared with the present rate of about two millimeters a year. John B. Anderson, a marine geologist at Rice University believes, however, that "there were at least three episodes of sudden sea-level rise in the past 10,000 years."
"The most recent episode occurred about 2000 B.C., when the sea level may have jumped considerably in just a few centuries."
- David Schneider, "The Rising Seas"
(3) Heinrich Events
On the floor of the ocean in which Iceland sits, there are "sudden interruptions in the placid layers of fine seafloor clay where sand and cobbles lie, ripped from the ground of central Canada and dropped all across the Atlantic by flotillas of icebergs."
- "Flood Stories, the Biggest Thing Since Noah" (04/13/97 )
"In 1988, German oceanographer Hartmut Heinrich proposed cyclic 'ice rafting' as an explanation for the eastern Canadian rock fragments he discovered deposited as rubble layers on the floor of the northeast Atlantic."
"To explain these Heinrich events, as they are now known, oceanographers proposed the ice sheet originally scraped the rubble from the Canadian continental bedrock. These rock fragments then went to sea on the undersides of icebergs that the seafloor evidence indicated were launched in large numbers."
- "Duke Study Suggests Earthquakes Launched Ice-Age Iceberg Flotillas"
It was proposed that the calving of the icebergs was a result of the steady thawing of Canada's Laurentide ice sheet by the sun.
"Dating techniques based on the radioactive decay of a form of carbon in the rubble layers show the events occurred in six different episodes between 70,000 and 16,000 years ago. But Hunt noted they did not occur at regularly-spaced intervals, as might be expected with a solar-induced phenomenon."
An opposing idea that a buildup of Laurentide ice sheet caused the icebergs to break off "was supported by evidence the Canadian ice sheet was steadily accumulating between roughly 110,000 and 14,000 years ago. Cores of ancient material, taken from today's Greenland's ice sheet and from ocean sediments, revealed higher amounts at that time of a form of oxygen that increases as the climate cools and ice deposits thicken."
"Each theorized iceberg purge would take an estimated 750 years to complete, too long to agree with other evidence that the iceberg swarms calved off in very short intervals, the Duke researchers [Malin and Hunt] added. They noted the rubble layers contain almost no foraminifera, tiny shell bearing animals that naturally accumulate on the seafloor at a slow and predictable rate over time. That absence suggest these layers were deposited suddenly."
- "Duke Study Suggests Earthquakes Launched Ice-Age Iceberg Flotillas"
"Other evidence [in addition to the rubble layers on the ocean] suggested that these layers, which formed every 7,000 to 12,000 years, marked periods of rapid climate change. Average temperatures climbed more than 10 degrees-the equivalent of moving the climate of Atlanta to Boston-in a few decades, followed a few thousand years later by an equally rapid return to normal."
- Smithsonian Magazine, "Phenomena, Comment & Notes"
The cause is theorized by Douglas MacAyael of the University of Chicago to have been a floating ice shelf off the Canadian coast (similar to the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica). This ice shelf would block massive glaciers, one atop Hudson Bay and the other lying on the St. Lawrence from discharging until the pressure grew too great and 'the cork popped'.
"...Malin, an earthquake expert, developed evidence for a different explanation for the iceberg flotillas. His calculations showed the ice sheet's growing mass could have caused the underlying Canadian crust to fail at approximately the same intervals as the Heinrich event.
"Each of those quakes would have been major ones, registering between Magnitude 7.2 and 8.2 on the Richter scale, which would cause the ground to move suddenly at accelerations greater than one-third Earth's gravity. As the crust shifted, the bottom of the ice sheet's edge would move with it."
- "Duke Study Suggests Earthquakes Launched Ice-Age Iceberg Flotillas"
Catastrophic Localized Flooding
The post glacial warming also produced catastrophic localized flooding. For example:
(1) The Mediterranean and Black Sea Basins
Evidence of salt beds and shallow lagoon fossils found in core samples (Deep Sea Drilling Project [DSDP] by the Glomar Challenger in 1970) show that pockets of the Mediterranean had evaporated during the last glacial period. The Straights of Gibraltar formed a narrow escarpment which blocked water from the Atlantic from entering the Mediterranean basin.
"The researchers [William Ryan and Walter Pitman - both geology professors at Columbia University] were reluctantly, but excitedly, driven to the conclusion that the Mediterranean Sea had dried up and refilled a dozen times in a million years. Since the Mediterranean basin is as much as 16,000 feet deep, the dry sea floor must have been an incredible hot desert for long periods of time. The lowest place on earth nowadays is the Dead Sea which is only 1300 feet below sea level Further studies confirmed that deep gorges in solid rock (now filled with ocean sediments and then river muds) lay under the Nile River and the Rhone River, suggesting that these rivers were once great torrents steeply dropping water into the empty Mediterranean basin. (However, other filled in gorges are also found around the world and are not unique to the Mediterranean). Best of all, the researchers imagined a prehistoric waterfall at the Straits of Gibraltar bringing in Atlantic ocean water with the volume of a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras at intervals lasting a hundred years or more."
- Lambert Dolphin , "The Great Mediterranean Desert"
"I was doing some research in the Black Sea in the late Seventies. I found an old shoreline about 110 meters under the surface. Then I found evidence of ancient beaches [including sea shells]. The old dune formations were extremely well-preserved. This proved that they had been covered suddenly by a huge volume of water. In other words, there had been a flood."
- Prof. Petro Kimitrov (Institute of Oceanology, Varna) ) interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
In 1993 Ryan and Pitman, aboard a Russian vessel tracking radiation levels in the Black Sea, obtained core samples which included desiccated clay with roots of shrubs and plants still in place.
"As it turns out, looking at the cores and the sediments, it was quite easy to see that 25-30,000 years ago the Black Sea was a fresh water lake. And it wasn't until, oh, maybe about 9,000 years ago [9,750 according to radio carbon-dating on the sea shells] that we hypothesized then that with the rise in sea level, that the waters of the Mediterranean eventually started getting into the Black Sea."
- Dr. David Ross (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
"According to the Russian model, the Black Sea level was at its lowest at around 20,000 years before present. At that time the Black Sea turned into a fresh water lake. And the level of this lake started to rise gradually, due to the influx of melted water from the North, until between 9-8,000 years the linkage was established and the salt water from the Mediterranean started to penetrate into the Black Sea. Then the two seas together started to rise at around 6,000 years before present."
- Dr. Pavel Dolukhanov (University of Newcastle) interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
Ryan and Pitman disagree that the rise in the sea levels remained gradual. The core samples showed an abrupt transition between marine muds and fresh water muds. Carbon-14 dating was performed on the shell samples. The Black Sea today is poisoned by a layer of salt water flowing in through the Bosphorus which settles on the bottom of the Black Sea and doesn't allow it to breathe.
"This date, 7,550 years ago, was exactly the date that he [Dr. Glenn Jones] had got from all his cores of the onset of the- beginning of a poisonous layer in the Black Sea. And this meant that when the salt water rushed in through the Bosphorus and flooded the shelves, it stopped the breathing of the Black Sea."
- Bill Ryan interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
Ryan and Pitman argue that a sedimentary plug damming the Bosphorus broke 7,540 years ago, and water flooded into the Black Sea basin.
"I was able to get a brief look at data obtained by the Turkish Navy all along the Bosphorus. And what I was able to see was that the depth to the hard rock below the sediment was 80 meters at a minimum and in many places over 100 meters. And what it indicated to me was that this groove, this channel, had to have been cut by a rush of fast-moving water [aprox. 100 km/hr]."
- Walter Pitman interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
"The inrushing waters would have quickly scoured all soil, sediments, and loose rock down to the bedrock from the passage to create what is estimated to have been a cataract the flow of which would have been in excess of a thousand times greater than that now observed during flood stage at Niagara Falls, or approximately twelve billion (12,000,000,000) cubic feet per minute. Those fleeing the encroaching waters would have had to move over a kilometer a day up gradient in order to escape drowning."
- D. Laing, "The Flood is Found"
In twelve months, the Black Sea rose 280 feet. (Today is well over a mile deep.)
"It's pretty amazing to think of raising an entire ocean basin 140 meters in certainly under thirty years. What that means globally, if you actually calculate how much water went into the Black Sea from the rest of the world's oceans, it lowered the world's oceans by about one foot."
- Dr. Glenn Jones [Texas Institute of Oceanography] interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
"The increased moisture in the air due to evaporation from both the cataract as well as sheet flooding of the dry basin could have resulted at some point in truly torrential rains in a region which had not experienced the like for millions of years (when the Mediterranean itself was flooded). Interestingly enough, studies of the Dead Sea reflect that the Black Sea flood occurred during an unusually wet historical period, and shortly thereafter the weather in the region assumed a pattern close to that of the present."
"Biblical scholar Michael Sanders has recently pointed out that the establishment of early Sumerian cities in the northern plain of the Tigris and Euphrates occurred shortly after the date of the Black Sea Flood."
- D. Laing, "The Flood is Found"
"According to Ryan and Pitman...the resulting dispersion of the populace led to the spread of farming skills, languages, and cultures to new settlements in southern Europe, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Asia. The archaeological record is supported by DNA studies that reveal genetic connections between modern peoples of these regions and remains found around the flood region. But Ryan and Pitman don't draw only on science, they study as well the flood stories of various cultures, from Sumer to India, contending that they remain remarkably similar despite local coloring and storytellers embellishments. These tales tell of the destruction of the world as it was then known..."
- Noah's Flood - Redux
(Kirkus Review of William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah's Flood The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History)
"The type of flood that we've found in the Black Sea has remarkable parallels in the Gilgamesh epic. In fact, the very word they use for `flood' --`abubu'--when seen in different contexts, talks to an orifice or a waterfall... a projectile... a roar that comes out of an orifice, out of the throat of a monster".
- Bill Ryan interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
"Traditionally it's been thought that when Gilgamesh made his journey in search of Upnapishtim [the only human immortal and the sole survivor of the Great Flood] he went to the Persian Gulf. But the actual description of his trip says otherwise. It is said that he set out in the direction of the setting sun, which means he went westerly, north- west; and eventually he came to the Sea of Death--a perfect description of the anoxic condition of the Black Sea."
- Walter Pitman interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a population explosion along the shores of the Black Sea 400 to 500 years after the flood when it crested and the sea level became stable.
"People who came from the Black Sea coast after the inundation probably would have come to a place like this: a small river flood plain with forests around it. Now, this resource zone is extremely different from the Black Sea coast. So you couldn't use the same knowledge, the same technology to live here as you could have used on the coast--it wouldn't have worked. So what would have happened is that probably over many years--perhaps 400, 500 years-- they would have come to rely on wheat agriculture. Wheat agriculture locks them into this place for permanent settlement. What you have, then, is the accumulation of successive building horizons one on top of the other. And this forms a tell.
"After about 5,000 BC, from 15-100 kilometers and further inland from the new Black Sea coast, these sights are popping up everywhere. That's incredible! That's 10 meters of people living here: that must be hundreds and hundreds of years of people settled in this place. It just defines the period so exactly."
- Douglass Bailey (University of Wales, Cardiff) interviewed in BBC's "Noah's Flood"
(2) The Columbia River Drainage
"It is now generally agreed that between 12,800 and 15,000 years ago more than 40 tremendous deluges of almost inconceivable force and dimensions swept across large parts of the Columbia River drainage. They were the greatest scientifically documented floods known to have occurred in North America."
- Alan Feuerbacher, "Documented Flooding in the Pacific Northwest"
Late in the last glacial period, the Okanogan Lobe of the Cordilleran icesheet stoppered up the Columbia River, near present-day Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho. Glacial Lake Missoula was formed, "stretching hundreds of miles across western Montana and containing more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined." After some years the lake pushed the glacier up and over. A wall of water over 2,000 feet high burst through the ice barrier, "shooting out of Clark Fork Canyon at speeds approaching 65 miles per hour a and at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world. At that rate the lake would have drained in as little as 48 hours!"
- Ice Age Institute - Missoula Floods
"Nearly 16,000 square miles were inundated to depths of hundreds of feet. Swollen by the flood waters, the Columbia grew to contain ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world today and 60 times the flow of the Amazon River."
- Alan Feuerbacher, "Documented Flooding in the Pacific Northwest"
"The deluge quickly stripped away 200 feet of soil and cut deep canyons or 'coulees' into the underlying bedrock, creating a vast maze-like network clearly visible from space."
- Ice Age Institute - Missoula Floods
"...These features [locally called 'scabland'] are not evident in the high country outside the flooded area, nor are they evident across the rest of the United States, even in areas that were under continental ice sheets."
- Alan Feuerbacher, "Documented Flooding in the Pacific Northwest"
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