Explorer Who Discovered The 'Titanic' Sets Out To Prove That Noah's Flood Formed Black Sea

Independent (UK) ^ | 7-23-2003 | David Usborne

[blam]

"Water from the Mediterranean, Mr Aksu counters, sloshed back and forth over countless years. "

If the Back Sea 'sloshed back and forth', there would me many shore lines underwater at various depths. All that has been found is one well defined shore line dated at 5,600BC. I support the Ryan & Pittman theory of a sudden, massive flood.

[Molly Pitcher]

For anyone further interested in the subject, I recommend Noah's Flood by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. The subtitle is: The new scientific discoveries about the event that changed history.

They are marine scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia U.

The book discusses at length the geological, oceanographic, archealogical, and linguistic evidence to back up this theory.

[blam]

"I recommend Noah's Flood by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. The subtitle is: The new scientific discoveries about the event that changed history."

Thanks, I have it and also highly recommend the book.

[Prof Engineer]

ping

[Jemian]

"The Noah's Flood idea is very sexy one

Sexy? Perhaps his concept of sex is a bit different than mine.

[blam]

I speculate that the ancestors of The Desert Mummies,in China, were also refugees from this flood. They spoke the language Tocharian A & B which is an extinct Indo-European language.

Another excellent book is The Tarim Mummies by Victor Mair.

[Salman]

Either Noah's Flood was mythological or miraculous. That is there is no geological evidence for a world-wide flood in historical or near-historical times.

Given the mythological explanation, it is still possible that the myth is based on some historical event. There is for example a world-wide flood in Ovid's Metamorphoses which parallels but does not agree with the Biblical account in all respects.

He may be right about the geological history of the Black Sea, but this isn't Noah's Flood even given the mythological explanation. Too early.

Another theory is a tsunami in the Mediterranean caused by the volcanic eruption on Crete which destroyed the Minoan civilization around 3000 BC.

And if you like your theories wild, there is always Velikovski's Worlds in Collision scenario.

[da_toolman]

What a deep subject.

[da_toolman]

What a deep subject.

[bethelgrad]

calling stories "sexy" must be a British thing. The first I'd heard it was in reference to Dr. Kelly's "sexy dossier."

[RightWhale]

They need to dredge up some wood pieces from the drowned villages at various depths and using dendrochronology nail down the date. That ought to do it.

[RightWhale]

Indo-European isn't that old. Maybe 2000 BC. There is a cuneiform font for IE, but it isn't related to the old Mesopotamian font or language.

[blam]

"That is there is no geological evidence for a world-wide flood in historical or near-historical times. "

The 300-500ft sea level rise at the end of the last Ice Age flooded the continents sometimes hundreds of miles inland.

Take a look at this map of the world's oceans lowered by about 300 ft. Notice that there's no Persian Gulf, the Red Sea is land locked, the Mediterranean was seperated into at least three segments and I speculate that the Gulf Of Mexico was sealed off also, etc. That was a worldwide flood.

[blam]

"They need to dredge up some wood pieces from the drowned villages at various depths and using dendrochronology nail down the date. That ought to do it."

Yup. I expect that's on the schedule, recall that they have already seen structures down there.

[blam]

"Indo-European isn't that old. Maybe 2000 BC. There is a cuneiform font for IE, but it isn't related to the old Mesopotamian font or language."

Early History Of The Indo European Languages

"Our work indicates that the protolanguage originated more than 6,000 years ago in eastern Anatolia and that some daughter languages must have differentiated in the course of migrations that took them first to the East and later to the West. "

[blam]

...more.

[farmfriend]

Gods, Graves, Glyphs
List for articles regarding early civilizations , life of all forms, - dinosaurs - etc.

[wcbtinman]

"...as the ice age ended, sea levels rose..."

When they can prove that, then I'll listen to them.

[B-Chan]

I've always wondered if there wasn't more to the Flood story that meets the eye. There are just too many mysteries surrounding it. For example: We know from Scripture that a wicked and quasi-human race called the Nephilim (a term meaning something very much like "space giants") dominated the civilization that preceded the Flood, resulting in a civilization that was evil beyond any other the world has seen. (The bloodthirsty and psychotic Harappan and Aztec civilizations come to mind here.) Could it be that this civilization was far more technologically advanced that anyone knows today? Such a civilization could have developed cloning, mind-control technologies, who knows what!

Our own society is infected with the notion of using technology to create what H.G. Wells called "men like gods"; it could be that these evil ancients did the same -- only they got further along. Perhaps they ended up creating some technological blasphemy that was so hideous that the Lord rightly decided to rid the Universe of them.

I realize that this is all pure speculation, but perhaps the destruction of this ancient technological civilization is the source of the Atlantis myth.

Another mystery is the Ark itself. We know from Scripture its exact dimensions. We also know that Noah took aboard a breeding populaton of every land-dwelling and flying animal on Earth prior to the Flood. Obviously, no handmade wooden boat could carry such a huge menagerie, plus food, fodder, and space for their wastes; how, then, did these creatures survive?

Maybe because the Ark wasn't an actual boat. Maybe it was something else -- something bigger on the inside than on the outside. Or maybe the animals didn't physically come along -- but their DNA did, in the form of some sort of data.

And then there's the Flood itself. "The gates of Heaven were opened", Scripture says; "The fountains of the deep were broken up". It is worth noting that Biblical scholars are far from being in agreement on what precisely that description means. Could it be that the flood is a metaphor for some other form of judgment?

Whatever the Flood was, it was much more than an ordinary rainstorm -- and the Ark much more than a big wooden boat. The details of the Flood story seem fantastic, like the stuff of legend, but the tale itself is told in a literalistic, matter-iof-fact way, like history. Perhaps the reason for that is that the Flod story is a description of something that people of Biblical times literally could not imagine. Maybe the "flood" was some kind of cosmic disaster, described in terms that the people of ancient Mesopotamia could grasp. We don't know.

I'm no Biblical scholar. Eevery bit of the above speculation is worth precisely what you paid for it: zero. The important thing about the Flood -- however it happened -- is the spiritual lesson behind it.

Still, every time I see a rainbow, I wonder...

[LiteKeeper]

SPOTREP