I know better than to get on these religion threads -I am unarmed...
But:. .
The Truth Behind Noah's Flood
Early Clues
The story of Noah and the great flood is one that so permeates our culture that generations of geologists have devoted their lives to looking for evidence of a prehistoric worldwide flood. But it was not until the 1990's that geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman gathered clues pointing to an actual ancient flood in the Middle East about 7,500 years ago. Sediment core-samples the scientists took from the bottom of the Black Sea revealed sections of once-dry, sun-baked land.
These sediments were then covered by sections of uniform mud, strongly suggesting that these plains underwent a long-ago influx of saltwater. Though not worldwide, this cataclysmic event occurred at what could have been a locus of human activity at the time.
In their 1998 book, Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History, Ryan and Pitman suggest the Black Sea was once a much smaller, land-locked freshwater lake, fed by ancient rivers, and surrounded by fertile plains. Neolithic people, Ryan and Pitman suppose, would have flocked to farm these Eden-like plains to farm them while supplementing their diets with the lake's abundant shellfish.
At this time - about 7,500 years ago - the global climate was still rapidly warming following the last Ice Age, causing the seas to rise. Ryan and Pitman hypothesize that, when sea levels rose beyond a critical point, the Mediterranean Sea overflowed, deluging the Black Sea basin with salty water and destroying the fertile plains around the once-shallow freshwater lake.
Any people living on those plains at the time would have witnessed what must have seemed like the wrath of an angry god. Based on the still northern flowing undercurrents of what we call the Bosporus Straits, Ryan and Pitman estimate the water rushed northward through this channel with force many times greater than Niagara Falls. As the waters rose about six inches per day, human settlements would have been washed away or under hundreds of feet of water within a year or so. Traumatized refugees from the flood must have told their story to shocked listeners. Is this the story so many of us still tell our children today?
Inspired by Ryan and Pitman's work, Bob Ballard and an international team of specialized scientists and engineers took a small fleet of ships and remotely operated vehicles (ROV's) into the Black Sea seeking evidence of human habitation before the flood.
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Much, much more, maps and pictures galore