Titanic Discoverer Finds Evidence of Biblical Flood

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."

Sohttp://www.sis-group.org.uk/sis-review-vol-v-4-issues-article-abstractsextracts.htmurce:

Problems of Continental Drift

The editors of the Review are often asked by readers about Velikovsky’s attitude to the theory of continental drift. In Earth in Upheaval (chapter viii: ‘The Sliding Continents’) Velikovsky was highly critical of the theory and seemed to reject it in favour of vertical motions of land masses and the apparent movement of continents due to shifts in the Earth’s axis. .....................When Earth in Upheaval was republished by Pocket Books in 1977, Velikovsky felt some extra comment on continental drift was necessary. He adopted a cautious neutral position and chose to reserve judgement on the theory. For the benefit of readers who do not have the Pocket Book edition we reprint here - by kind permission of Mrs. Elisheva Velikovsky - the Foreword and Author’s Note from this new edition. We have also included, as an informed view of the ‘state of play’ with regard to drift theory, an article by Dr. Peter Smith, one of Britain’s foremost geophysicists. - Peter J. James.

A New Introduction to Earth In Upheaval, by Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky
.........I said that I would not revoke anything from the original edition. However, to one section I would like to make some pertinent remarks. By the 1950s, the hypothesis (1920) of A. Wegener about Drifting Continents gained in acceptance; ..............My position on continental drift was (and is) intermediary between those who reject this concept and those who support the idea ..............

‘Wegener’s Legacy’, by Peter J. Smith

........it was Wegener who first drew the global evidence (including Taylor’s) together at length, in his book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1915); it was Wegener who was vilified by almost the entire geological community during the 1920s; it was Wegener whose influence was remembered when the tide began to turn in his favour, posthumously alas, during the 1950s;

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