Posted on 12/14/2012 9:10:06 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Ocean explorer Robert Ballard, who is responsible for the discovery of the Titanic shipwreck, says he may have discovered evidence of the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis.
Ballard is now on a mission to find evidence that the "mother of all floods" actually occurred, he told Christiane Amanpour of ABC News.
"We went in there to look for the flood," he told ABC News. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... The land that went under stayed under."
The explorer's mission was prompted by research conducted by Columbia University marine geologists William B.F. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman III. These men theorized that climate change during a glacial period caused the icecaps to melt, an article from The Earth Institute at Columbia University states, which led to widespread flooding.
Ryan and Pitman suggest the Bosporus strait, which served as a natural dam between the Mediterranean and Black seas, broke open at that time and caused salt water to flood the Black Sea with a force 200 times stronger than that of Niagara Falls. With the waters rising at the rate of about six inches per day, the flooding could have covered 60,000 square miles in less than a year, they theorize, causing humans to migrate away from the area and at the same time inspiring the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah's ark. Ryan and Pitman's theory can be found in their 1999 book, Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About The Event That Changed History.
After deciding to explore this theory themselves, Ballard's team found an ancient shoreline 400 feet below the surface, which suggests a flood catastrophe did occur there. After carbon dating shells from the shoreline, Ballard estimated the event occurred about 5,000 BC – around the time some believe the flood described in Genesis occurred.
Although natural evidence has given him confidence in his research, Ballard is also looking for more evidence of the civilizations that were affected by the disaster. "We started finding structures that looked like they were man-made structures," Ballard said. "That's where we are focusing our attention right now."
His team has found ancient pottery in the area, as well as a shipwreck and partial human remains which he says are from around 500 BC. Although the shipwreck is too recent to have been caused by the flood, it gives him hope he will find something older, he says.
The Bible says God caused the Great Flood because the human race had become corrupt. He forewarned a righteous man, Noah, about the disaster and commissioned him to build an ark, which he would use to rescue his family members as well as a male and female pair of each living creature so they could repopulate the earth once the waters had receded.
The flood occurred after the "fountains of the great deep burst forth" and "the windows of the heavens were opened," and it rained for forty days and nights, the Genesis account states. Eventually, as it subsided, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
Ballard says he doesn't expect to find Noah's famous vessel during his exploration, though he hopes to find remnants of the people and places that existed at the time of the event.
"It's foolish to think you will ever find a ship," he said. "But can you find people who were living? Can you find their villages that are underwater now? And the answer is yes."
Georgia Perdum, research scientist and speaker for Answers In Genesis, says despite Ryan and Pitman's treatment of Noah's story as a myth, she and other Christians could interpret the newly found evidence differently.
"I think any research where they're going to be looking for evidence of a catastrophic flood is always something that we're interested in," Perdum told The Christian Post on Tuesday. "Obviously we have different ideas about what that means: We would say, from a biblical standpoint, that would be potentially evidence of the Noachian flood."
Ballard and his team plan to return to Turkey in the summer of 2013.
I remember reading about this years ago.
Why is Big Media talking about it now?
To stir up interest in the Turkey region, to bolster support for the messiah’s sending over support to more anti-American muslim factions?
Obviously there must have been a monstrous flood in the region because at one point the Black Sea was a freshwater lake.
Whew! At least we now know how the whales wound up in the desert.
And the Sahara desert was grassland and lakes 12000 years ago. There’s plenty of evidence pointing to a much wetter mideast in the past as well.
I think what is important to consider is that the reason there are multiple stories of a ‘flood’, and varying evidence, is that there have been many large scale floods throughout the history of Earth.
The crust of the Earth is constantly moving up and down. As it does, water then seeks the lowest level. Ergo, water level changes happen daily. Large scale ones happen when things like Earthquakes occur. Those happen in the hundreds per day. There have been many ‘floods’, and many stories. Like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The story in the Bible on Noah is a parable, but is based on an actual incident, or multiple incidents.
The importance of the story in the Bible is that nobody but Noah would listen to God even when warned of the impending catastrophe.
The story in the Bible on Noah is a parable, but is based on an actual incident, or multiple incidents.
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I do not see anything in Scripture that would indicate it is a parable, it is a recording of history if you read Genesis, it records history.
ping
Everything said in that story has already been on some TV show, i think Nat Geo channel. Yes a few years ago.
As an addition Immanuel Velikovsky also wrote ‘Worlds in Collision’. These two books may give you insight to these recent discoveries.
There have been a few big floods that have been discovered over the years. This is nothing new.
One day, maybe, we will be able to prove it all happened exactly as stated in Genesis.
Yet, I suspect, we will continue to ignore the lesson.
No less than Jesus himself authenticated what happened, and the flood itself is not the important event here, it was for (and because of) what occurred in Genesis Chapter 6,
When the end of the age comes upon us, in our future, it begins out of a blue sky day, just like in the days of Lot and Noah and will be of fire and not water:
“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Matthew 24:36-39
“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; And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; . .”
2 Peter 2:4-6
Well that does not batch the Bible's description of the flood.
The bible is one of the greatest history books ever compiled by man.
There has been so many archaeological finds verifying so many of the writings. In my opinion, there is way more truth than there is fiction.
You are preaching to the choir here, my response was to someone that didn’t believe the veracity of the flood.
“may have...”
Me too.
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