A Flood of Evidence

...This is not the first time that scientific discoveries have influenced how we read the Bible...

...a huge and relatively heavily populated area around the Black Sea was suddenly and permanently inundated with a flood of Biblical proportions...

...When evidence for an expanding universe was still shaky, this implication could be ignored or dismissed...

...Similarly, the layers of mollusk and diatom shells show an abrupt change from fresh water to salt water species, and that change occurs at the same time throughout the lakebed...

...Of course, the most persuasive proof of a cataclysmic flood would be archaeological evidence of Neolithic habitation found at the bottom of the Black Sea: While one might argue highly technical findings and their interpretations, there really could be no other explanation for a 7,500-year-old village in the middle of the Black Sea...

...The cosmological and theological implications of an expanding universe were obvious: If the universe is expanding, then its size in the past must have been smaller, and its past must be finite...

...Some may argue that the account in Genesis is the cataclysmic story of a history-changing flood passed down orally for millennia and finally written with a God-of-judgment interpretation by the ancient Hebrews, just as the Babylonians recorded the event in the Gilgamesh epic...

...Ryan and Pitman develop their Great Flood theory and support it in proper scientific fashion...

...We have no such evidence yet, but it may appear in the near future...

...Back in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble published data supporting the then-novel conclusion that the universe is expanding...

...Finally, direct measurement of pore-water—microscopic aggregates of water trapped between particles in the packed muck of the sea bottom—confirms a rapid change from fresh to saline conditions...

...A biblical literalist will argue that the Black Sea flood has nothing to do with Noah's Flood...

...The downpour washed away the apex of the Bosporus dam separating the two enormous basins, and the cascading Mediterranean waters eroded the edge further and further...

...Their flight, the authors contend, was responsible for the rapid spread of agriculture into these areas that occurred around the time, and they must have carried their story with them...

...So rapid was the oceans' rising that it would have been visible in even a single lifetime of the coast-dwelling Europeans who were then hunting and gathering in proper Paleolithic fashion...

...At the end of the last ice age, the area now occupied by the Black Sea was a small fresh water lake called the New Euxine Lake by geologists...

...For that full year, the terrified population had to run over a kilometer a day to escape the water...

...The answer—at least for the greatest of floods, that time in Noah's day when "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened" —turns out to be under water...

...ing and surprisingly fun blend of geology, history, archaeology, and anthropology to argue that about 5400 B.C...

...Ryan and Pitman argue that they fled up the river valleys into Europe, and south of the Caucasus mountains to the Fertile Crescent, the Levant, and Egypt...

...The whole world's supply of ocean water provided the pressure behind the flood...

...If so, their prayers were more than answered...

...In it, there is no direct challenge to theology, but rather to biblical interpretation...

...Ryan and Pitman do not speculate as to where the drop of water fell that displaced the pebble that opened the trickle that started the flood that changed the world...

...A secularist will argue that Ryan and Pitman have proved the Bible story is only folktale...

...Meanwhile, cut off from its former source of water, the New Euxine Lake declined, its level falling to 150 meters below that of the Mediterranean, from which it was separated by a narrow land barrier at the Bosporus...

...In January 1999, Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic wreck, announced that he was lending his talents to a major expedition to search for these ancient settlements...

...Eventually, the flood covered an area the size of Florida...

...But sonar mapping shows the seabed to be carved by ancient rivers and even reveals the eroded gorge at the junction of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, just as the rapid-flood theory would predict...

...Eventually, the Mediterranean rose to the sill of the Bosporus land barrier...

...But by the mid-1960s, data began to emerge against this "steady-state" model: The steady-state theory predicted, for instance, no cosmic background radiation, while the Big Bang theory predicted it precisely as it was later found...

...Those who take the Bible seriously but not literally, however, have other options...

...The sight must have been horrific...

...And in the fertile lowlands around its shores, Ryan and Pitman suggest, early experiments in agriculture and herding were underway...

...The bloated carcasses of wildlife and domestic animals joined those of the fish killed by the rapid conversion of the lake from fresh water to salt...

...But in this case, there would have been an increase in force...

...At first, the melting European glaciers filled the lake with cold torrents...

...Of course, another scenario is also possible...

...In recent years, fundamental discoveries in cosmol-ogy—^indeed, the establishment of cosmology as a science rather than a branch of philosophy—have shone a new and not unfriendly light on the biblical story of creation...

...It's hard to imagine that growing knowledge of the Black Sea flood will not have some impact on the way that people look at the Noah story...

...And as the cleft rapidly eroded, deeper water (under greater pressure) joined the cascade...

...Probably there was a heavier than usual rain storm in the eastern Mediterranean, even if it did not last for forty days and forty nights...

...In most dam ruptures, the force of the flood gradually drops as the water level of the source declines...

...If the level of the New Euxine Lake had risen slowly, then the sharp contours of tributary river erosion would not have survived...

...But as time went on, and evidence of expansion accumulated, it became more net-tlesome...

...Perhaps those ancient farmers were praying to their carved stone goddesses, asking for rain...

...Ryan and Pitman suggest that the inrush lasted for about a year...

...In 1948, a competing theory, allowing for expansion of the universe without an act of creation, relieved some of the theological pressure...

...The Big Bang theory, most recently corroborated by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite findings, is now the theory of the universe's origin...

...It may happen that the Black Sea flood, unlike the Big Bang, will remain an event known only to a few scientists but not absorbed into common knowledge...

...The relation to the Great Flood of the Bible is, of course, what provokes our interest in Ryan and Pitman's book...

...But in their new volume, Noah's Flood, they've managed an excitEric Chevlen is a physician in Youngstown, Ohio...

...Its volume was enormous, perhaps fifty cubic kilometers a day...

...Others may claim that the divine author of the Bible revealed this bit of history to us as He did others—with the proper interpretations implicit in the narrative and in the way in which we recipients of revelation could best understand it...

...What became of the displaced and scattered survivors of the flood...

...As the waters poured across the Bosporus dam, there would be no measurable drop in the level of the source...

...The Flood story is different from the Big Bang, however...

...But as those European glaciers retreated further, local quirks of geography led their runoff to drain to the north and west instead...

...That is the equivalent of two hundred Niagara Falls, its roar audible for five hundred kilometers...

...This raised the level of the world oceans and the Mediterranean, as did the melting of the North American glaciers, and Ryan and Pitman demonstrate the change in sea level with geological evidence from as far away as the coral reefs of Barbados...

...William Ryan and Walter Pitman are career marine geologists whose work normally involves technical, academic accounts of what happens beneath the briny surface...

...It may remain as obvious and unknown as a flood hidden beneath the sea...

...For the people then living along the New Euxine Lake, all the world they had ever seen would soon be covered by water...

...The northern shores of the New Euxine Lake would have been especially hazardous, for there the slope of the land is gentler, and the flood would have spread faster than the people could flee...