Explorer finds underwater evidence of great flood

Explorer finds underwater evidence of great flood

WASHINGTON (November 19, 1999 2:37 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - The man who tracked down the Titanic and other undersea mysteries has found evidence that the Black Sea was inundated in a giant flood about 7,000 years ago - perhaps the biblical flood of Noah.

Explorer Robert Ballard reported this week that he was looking for ancient shipwrecks off the north coast of Turkey last summer and decided to check out the flood theory.

Columbia University researchers William Ryan and Walter Pittman have speculated that when the European glaciers melted, the Mediterranean Sea overflowed into what was then a smaller freshwater lake to create the current Black Sea.

Many ancient Middle Eastern cultures have legends of a great flood, including the Bible story of Noah.

Ballard used side-scan sonar, similar to that used to locate the undersea wreck of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, to study the floor of the Black Sea.

He found, well out to sea, an ancient coastline and a change from freshwater to saltwater mollusks dating from about 7,000 years ago.

But considering the flow of water through the narrow channel now known as the Bosporus, Ballard told the National Geographic Society: "The flood wasn't over in 40 days. ... The whole event probably lasted about 40 years."

People living on flat areas near the lake would have faced a sea widening by a mile a day. Along cliffs water rose about six inches a day, he said.

In the area studied by Ballard, along the southern coast of the Black Sea, the waters would have risen gradually, he said, which preserved contours of the original beach.

Ballard scooped up a bucket of shells from the ancient shoreline - now 550 feet below the sea's surface - and sent them to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia for analysis.

The shells included both extinct freshwater mollusks, presumably from before the flood, and saltwater mollusks from the postflood era.

The shells were then radiocarbon-dated at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The most recent date for the freshwater shells was about 7,460 years ago, while the oldest saltwater shells dated to 6,820 years ago. That indicates a change about 7,000 years in the past.

Ballard plans to return to the Black Sea next August to search for ancient merchant vessels and more clues about the ancient flood.

"We'd like to find some evidence of human habitation: stone walls, pottery, hearths," he told National Geographic, a sponsor of his work.