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.
yes, I know
I was just joining in on the song :-)
> Why is Big Media talking about it now?
Because it isn’t — the source for this is Christian Post. And Ballard was very diplomatic in his handling of this, but said, he wasn’t confirming or denying, and that there was no way to confirm or deny a Noachian Flood.
“Ages in Chaos” is imho the best introduction into Immanuel Velikovsky’s works, but in this context, the better choice would not be AiC or WiC, but “Earth in Upheaval”.
Dr V, on The Flood:
http://www.varchive.org/itb/rabdel.htm
Thanks...I forgot that title. In any case I’m glad that I’m not the only one that has read his thesis. BTW I did read all three at least 40 years ago.
Velikovsky was correct in finding the link between the European/African land mass and the North/South American continent.
What link was that?
The link of the continents is from Wegener, and yes, V cited it, but it isn’t original to him, and it’s unnecessary for the rest of his thesis. He pointed out that the fault lines actually are a sort of moebius, circling the world twice, and revealing that it has been in the grip of a large external force, rather than the nice, slow, quiet drifting of Wegener’s fantasy.
The “Plate Tectonics Revolution” of the 1960s revived continental drift, but under that new name, offering very little new. Wegener’s idea that the trivial resemblance of part of the west coast of Africa with part of the east coast of South America meant that they must at one time be joined.
I’m glad to see we have traveled in the same circles of literature. If you remember correctly V made the statement that positive proof of the link of continents up to his writing had not been proved. V claimed that the link would be found. As I understand it the link to the continents and their drift were found after V’s death.
Again, where did he write it? It’s been some years for me as well, at least as far as “Earth In Upheaval” is concerned.
The Great Rift and the Jordan
http://www.varchive.org/itb/rift.htm
The Ocean
http://www.varchive.org/ce/ocean.htm
I think you’ll find your answer here: “Velikovsky’s 1955 book Earth In Upheaval strove to do for geology what Worlds in Collision had done for astronomy. Attempting to collect the ‘physical evidence’ for the planetary billiards described in the former, the book espoused an extreme form of geological catastrophism (i.e. that the majority of the Earth’s geological features had been formed within timescales of hours, days or weeks, rather than gradually over “millions of years”). Volcanism, pole shifts, mass extinctions, orogeny were all grist to the mill. Velikovsky did say that he was not questioning the conventional view of the age of the Earth, nor did he question evolution. Subsequent decades have seen catastrophist ideas gain some acceptance amongst the scientific community (such as a possible meteoric impact event at the Cretaceous-Tertary boundary causing extinction of the dinosaurs), and there may even be a little bit of similarity between Velilovsky’s claims about “catastrophic evolution” and recent theories of “punctuated equilibrium”. However the timescales and causes proposed by Velikovsky (near collisions with Venus and Mars in 1500 and 747 BC) continue to be regarded as ludicrous nonsense by the mainstream. Velikovsky spent a significant part of Earth in Upheaval pooh-poohing the then relatively new theory of continental drift, which he realised that if true could explain some of the geological phenomena he put down to catastrophes. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his essay Velikovsky in Collision, Velikovsy’s objections were shared at the time by some orthodox geologists, i.e. that there was no mechanism to explain continental drift, but this problem has now been resolved.”
So, iow, Velikovsky didn’t support continental drift.
Ballard has to be careful how he words things in order to maintain credibility in scientific circles. Without extremely strong evidence, it is tough there to advocate a position which might be viewed as controversial, at least by some scientists.
It should be the same standard for any claimed scientific discovery, and the data should be available for all to examine. (Which is partly why the Global Warming/Climate Change thingy has devolved into a cult instead of science.)
Ballard will do it right, present his findings, and for now at least let the reader draw their own conclusions.
No, the end time will be like the days of Noah. That means we will suffer the terror and evil of those days.
I also find attempts to paint such a global catastrophe as being impossible to be a stretch. A large, icy comet would fit the bill quite nicely. We have record of such collisions in the form of craters now. Catastrophism isn't the heresy or the laughingstock that it once was as recently as a few decades ago.
Looking to the Biblical text and the record there, of antediluvian conditions on the planet, we see no surface bodies of water, plants thrived off of a sort of mist arising from the ground itself, no seasons per se, a very stable climate that was at least semitropical and very mild.
We see advanced human ages being recorded that sound bizarre to us, nine humpndred years or more. Such a collision might alter the meaning of time as pertains to a day or a year just as severely as it is recorded as having altered climate and geography.
The planet, absent this large quantity of water from an icy comet, would have been smaller. Faster rotation on it's axis, shorter years in absolute time, too, due to a faster orbit. “Continental drift” would be the remnants of the original planetary surface.
Sounds fantastical, yes, but then so much of the antediluvian world from the Biblical account does, especially if you delve into extra-Biblical accounts such as the Book Of Enoch.
Science does not have to automatically negate religion. That it invariably does indicates an unhealthy, unscientific bias to me.
The Flood is explained in a series of slides found here: http://www.threeimpacts-twoevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/COMET-IMPACT-ANALYSIS-AND-EFFECTS-21Dec12-WEBSITE1.pdf
It might help to read through the description of another event first: http://www.threeimpacts-twoevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/SIMULTANEOUS-IMPACTS7.pdf
The purpose of the postings is to explain new models based on new data: geospatial information from Google Maps or Google Earth, interpreted using Visual Analytics, supports a “Simultaneous Impacts Theory” that explains how the geologic tectonic plates were created. Other geospatial data (submerged topographic features) leads to another finding that explains how a comet impact brought about a world-wide flood. The hypotheses affect the way we think about Earth and human history.
See post 38.
See post 38.
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