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October 03, 2002

Noah's Flood: DId it Happen?

Finally got my copy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Through the Universe, and was mildly surprised to learn that the cover art was different than what is pictured On Amazon. It's actually blue and black. So if you've ordered it, don't be shocked when it looks different. It's a feature, not a bug.

With that, I'm out of here for a few days. I'm off to San Francisco to see a few folks and to speak at JournalCon 2002; I'll be on the panel discussion "Writing for Fun and Profit." That's fair since I do both. I'll be back on Monday but probably won't update this site until Tuesday at the earliest but more likely next Wednesday. Until then -- well, it's a big Internet. I'm sure you'll keep yourself amused. Here's one last science article to send you off.

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Did Noah's Flood Really Happen?
Some think they've found the historical event that launched the legend of Noah's Ark. Others aren't so sure.

You know the story of The Flood, of course: One day God, annoyed with humanity, decides that what the Earth really needs is a good long soak. So He commands His faithful servant Noah to build an ark to hold two of every species (except livestock and birds, for which he needs to carry seven pair of each -- a detail many people forget); once that's accomplished, God unleashed a flood with rain that lasted for the fabled 40 days and 40 nights.

Many Christians take this account as the gospel truth. Others, however, wonder if the story of Noah isn't rooted in some more local and less globally catastrophic event -- one memorable enough, however, to spawn a series of flood legends. Besides the Biblical story of the flood, other civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean area also had significant flood legends, including the Greeks (who has Zeus creating a flood to punish the wicked), and the Sumerians and Babylonians, whose flood legends also include a righteous family, and an ark filled with creatures (the Sumerian version even had the ark's owner, a fellow named Utnapishtim, release birds to find land).

In 1999, two Columbia University researchers named William Ryan and Walter Pitman put out a book called Noah's Flood, which offered a tantalizing suggestion The flood in question happened near the Black Sea around 7,000 years ago. At this time, the theory goes, glaciers left on the European continent from the last ice age melted, sending their runoff into the Mediterranean Sea. As the Mediterranean Sea swelled, it breached the land at the Bosporus Strait, near where Istanbul stands. This breach released a flood of water into a freshwater lake that sat where the Black Sea is today. This freshwater lake was quickly inundated with salty Mediterranean water (at the rate of six inches per day) and grew to the present size of the Black Sea within a couple of years -- bad news for the humans whose homes and villages were situated on the shores of the former freshwater lake, and certainly memorable enough to be the basis for many a flood legend.

Ryan and Pittman's flood theory appeared to get a major boost in 2000, when famed underwater explorer Robert Ballard discovered the remnants of human habitation in 300 feet of water, 12 miles into the Black Sea, off the coast of northern Turkey. Ballard also found evidence of the Black Sea changing from fresh water to salt water: Sets of freshwater shells that dated back 7,000 years, followed by saltwater shells that dated back 6,500 years. Somewhere between those times, it seemed, the Black Sea was born out of a freshwater lake. It's also the historically correct time for Noah's famous flood.

Aside from the obvious housing problems that this rising tide of saltwater presented anyone living on the edge of the freshwater lake, it would also have the rather unfortunate side effect of killing anything that lived in the freshwater lake itself -- most creatures that live in freshwater environments will die off in saltwater environments (and vice-versa).

However, the newly arriving saltwater species wouldn't have been much better off: Salt water is denser than fresh water, so the new water from the Mediterranean sank under the fresh water, and the oxygen exchange between these levels of water was pretty much blocked. Any saltwater creatures that came along for the ride eventually suffocated. All those dead animals probably made the Black Sea a stinky place to be for a while. The silver lining here, however, is that oxygen-free water makes for a fabulous medium to preserve shipwrecks. Any boat that's sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea since about 5500 BC is still there, unmolested by local marine life.

So, case closed, right? We've found the famous Biblical flood? Not so fast: In May of 2002 a group of scientists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geographical Society of America, refuting the idea of a sudden flood of Mediterranean seawater flooding into the Black Sea area. Their contention is that based on mud samples they've found in the Marmara Sea (just on the other side of the Bosporus Strait from the Black Sea), there has been interaction between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea area for at least 10,000 years -- suggesting that the Black Sea filled in over a much slower period of time: About 2,000 years or so. So while the water levels in the Black Sea definitely rose, the rate of their rise wouldn't constitute a "flood" by any conventional standard of the word.

That's where the debate stands at the moment -- those who think the Black Sea was created in two years, and those who contend it was created in two thousand. In the scientific search for Noah's Flood, the jury is still out.

Posted by john at October 3, 2002 08:51 PM

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