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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (187106)	5/23/2006 12:21:46 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 281500

Could be an event like this... Black Sea deluge theory From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized prehistoric flood that occurred when the Black Sea rapidly filled. The theory made headlines when it surfaced in The New York Times December 1996. In 1998, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University, published evidence that a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred about 5600 BCE. Glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes, while sea levels remained lower worldwide. The fresh water lakes were emptying their waters into the Aegean Sea. As the glaciers retreated, rivers emptying into the Black Sea reduced their volume and found new outlets in the North Sea, and the water levels lowered through evaporation. Then, about 5600 BC, as sea levels rose, Ryan and Pitman suggest, the rising Mediterranean finally spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosphorus. The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. Ryan and Pitman wrote: Black Sea today (light blue) and in 5600 BCE according to Ryan's and Pitman's theories"Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. …The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days." Although neolithic agriculture had by that time already reached the Pannonian plain, the authors link its spread with people displaced by the postulated flood. It has been suggested that the survivors' memory of this event was the source of the legend for Noah's Flood. Initial resistance came from those who looked for more detailed correlation with the Book of Genesis (see Noah's Ark and Mount Ararat) or preferred as prototype the similar marine ingression that formed the Persian Gulf in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valley. Earth scientists also disputed the conclusions. More recent examinations by oceanographers such as Teofilo A. "Jun" Abrajano Jr at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Canadian colleague Ali Aksu of Memorial University of Newfoundland have cast some doubt on this catastrophic flood theory. Abrajano's team, finding sapropel mud deposits in the Sea of Marmara, have concluded that there has been sustained interaction between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea for at least 10,000 years: "For the Noah's Ark Hypothesis to be correct, one has to speculate that there was no flowing of water between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea before the speculated great deluge. We have found this to be incorrect." In a series of expeditions, a team of marine archeologists led by Robert Ballard identified what appeared to be ancient shorelines, freshwater snail shells, drowned river valleys, tool-worked timbers, and man-made structures in roughly 300 feet (100 m) of water off the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Radiocarbon dating of freshwater mollusk remains indicated an age of about 7,000 years. According to a report in New Scientist magazine (May 4, 2002, p. 13), the researchers found an underwater delta south of the Bosporus. There was evidence for a strong flow of fresh water out of the Black Sea in the 8th millennium BCE. The review of sediments in the Black Sea in 2004 by a pan-European project (Assemblage - Noah Project) confirmed the conclusion of Pitman/Ryan. Further, calculations made by Mark Siddall predicted an underwater canyon that was actually found. The hypothesis remains an active subject of debate among archaeologists. en.wikipedia.org