The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (31 page)

The connection to the story of Atlantis comes through Plato, who believed it had been handed down since the time of the great lawgiver Solon. Two hundred years before Plato’s time, Solon traveled to Egypt and asked priests there about Deucalion’s flood. They told him of a great disaster that had destroyed the mighty island metropolis of Atlantis. Lying at the center of three concentric harbors connected to the sea by a narrow channel, the great city vanished in a single day. This island kingdom beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which Plato placed past the Straits of Gibraltar, existed nine thousand years before Solon’s time.

Galanopoulos suggested that Solon had mistranslated the Egyptian word for one hundred as one thousand, because when divided by ten, Plato’s age for Atlantis comes out at about 1500
BC
and its size matches that of Santorini. Did Plato realize that Solon’s oversized island would not fit in the Mediterranean, and did he move the Pillars of Hercules from the southern Peloponnesus to Gibraltar, expediently banishing Atlantis to the unexplored world beyond?

Whether or not they lived in Atlantis, the inhabitants of Santorini built their city on the flanks of an active volcano. They chose the easily defended island because it was ringed by the natural moat of a volcanic caldera pleasantly plumbed with geothermal hot water. In exchange for the Bronze Age luxury of running hot water, residents unwittingly took on the risk of living in a city that lay within the heart of an active volcano. Eventually, the catastrophic eruption of their island home obliterated their idyllic city and triggered a tsunami. I suspect that this event is immortalized in the story of Deucalion’s flood.

Others have argued that a more gradually rising sea level, and not a tsunami, was responsible for the world’s flood stories. In 1960, Rhodes Fairbridge, a Columbia University geology professor, proposed that flooding of coastal lowlands around the world displaced human communities and spawned ancient flood stories when sea level rose by several hundred feet as the ice caps melted at the end of the last glaciation. His hypothesis did not win many converts, as no one would need an ark to escape a sea rising less than a foot a year.

Map of the Black Sea showing connection to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara, and Bosporus.

However, the collapse of the North American ice sheet during deglaciation did cause a rapid five-foot rise in sea level between 8,300 and 8,200 years ago, right about the time of the last big flood from Lake Agassiz. The rising sea flooded coastal areas across Europe and led to the sudden loss of land favored by early farmers. This event coincided with an abrupt migration of Neolithic peoples and an expansion of early agriculture into areas previously occupied by hunter-gatherers. Earlier, Neolithic sites in Europe were restricted to Anatolia and Greece. Following the abrupt rise in sea level, farming began spreading across the continent. How did a rising sea level trigger a Stone Age migration?

It has been suggested that this jump in sea level catastrophically breached the low ridge of the Bosporus, spilling the Mediterranean into a low-lying freshwater lake in the Black Sea basin. This event would have submerged almost 28,000 square miles and topped the lake up to sea level. This may have submerged some of the earliest farming communities, sending refuges off in all directions.

In the spring of 1969 the oceanographic research vessel
Atlantis II
found a remarkable layer of organic matter in the bed of the Black Sea. Sandwiched as the middle of three distinct sedimentary layers, the black mud recorded how a former sea turned into a freshwater lake and then back into a sea. In some places half of the curious black mud was composed of plant and animal remains. The organic muck lay atop unusual gray clay with fresh water in its pores. The saltwater fauna of the lowest layer was replaced by freshwater organisms, which were then replaced by saltwater species sometime later. Apparently, the Black Sea had been a freshwater lake when the sea level was lower and rivers were swollen with glacial meltwater. Then an influx of seawater shifted the bottom of the water body from well oxygenated to stagnant, oxygen-poor conditions. When did this happen? Radiocarbon dating of the organic matter in the strange layer of black mud indicated that the rush of seawater occurred about seven thousand years ago.

In 1972 the Victoria Institute, a Christian society established in 1865 with the professed mission to reconcile apparent discrepancies between the latest geological findings and scripture, held a symposium on Noah’s Flood. There, British Bible-science enthusiast Robert Clark suggested that the biblical flood deposited the organic-rich mud at the bottom of the Black Sea. Perhaps the sea level rose enough to spill into the Black Sea when a large piece of Antarctic ice calved into the sea, or when a volcano erupted beneath the ice cap. However it happened, Clark thought the stagnant conditions at the bottom of the Black Sea ensured preservation of a flooded landscape deep below the surface. Few took seriously his suggestion that Noah’s hometown might lay entombed beneath the mud of the Black Sea.

Yet since antiquity we’ve known water flows both ways between the Mediterranean and Black seas. The lighter, fresher water of the Black Sea flows out above a reverse current of denser salt water that flows from the Mediterranean along the bottom. Up until the invention of steam power, mariners traveling upstream to the Black Sea pulled themselves through the Dardanelles and Bosporus by lowering baskets full of stones down into the strong bottom current, which then dragged their boats against the surface current. Hugging the seafloor, a submerged river of salt water flowed into the Black Sea.

In 1993, oceanographers Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman led a joint Russian-American expedition to survey and sample the floor of the strategically important Black Sea. Scanning the seabed with sonar, their team found evidence of ancient streambeds, river-cut canyons, and submerged shorelines. In samples of the bottom sediments saltwater mussels replaced freshwater mussels at the transition from the gray clay to the strange black mud above it. When their carbon dates came back from the lab they were astounded to find that the first marine creatures that invaded the freshwater lake were the same age no matter where and at what depth they sampled. Oxygen depletion and saltwater intrusion started simultaneously throughout the Black Sea, exactly what one would expect if a sudden flood of salt water smothered a great freshwater lake.

High-resolution profiles of subsurface layers, mapped by setting off small explosions and measuring the travel time of the resulting seismic waves, revealed a former land surface buried in the seafloor sediments. The unconformity defined by the contact between the layers of sediment above and below this surface extended to depths well below the bedrock sill at the Bosporus. Drill cores punched into and brought up from the seafloor contained subaerial desiccation cracks and in-place roots of shrubs covered by marine mud. Changes in the isotopic composition of different layers in the cores showed it took about a thousand years for enough seawater to pour into the Black Sea basin from the Mediterranean to begin supporting marine life on the seabed. A later expedition in 2000 discovered evidence for a shoreline with a cobble beach hundreds of feet below the modern waves.

Ryan and Pitman knew that farming had been practiced in the region for at least a thousand years before the Mediterranean spilled into the Black Sea. Anyone living in the fertile valley would have been forced to flee with their livestock as their world disappeared beneath the rising waters. Archaeologists had found that this time coincided with the onset of the initial migration of farming cultures into Europe and the floodplains of Mesopotamia. Here was another candidate for a reasonable explanation of Noah’s Flood.

Other scientists have challenged Ryan and Pitman’s interpretation of a sudden influx of salt water into the Black Sea. The assemblage of microscopic marine creatures (foraminifera) recovered from cores drilled into the bed of the Marmara Sea, the water body that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, suggests an earlier, less catastrophic reconnection, and a more gradual flooding than that inferred by Ryan and Pitman. In addition, the elevation of delta deposits at the pre-flood mouth of the Danube River, where it drained into the Black Sea, constrains the pre-flood water level in the Black Sea to having been less than a hundred feet below modern sea level. This means that Ryan and Pitman’s flood could have raised the water level in the Black Sea by no more than that amount. While the geological community was divided over the Black Sea flood
hypothesis, most of the authors in a 2007 volume dedicated to examining its geological basis argued in favor of a gradual, noncatastrophic reconnection of the Mediterranean and Black Sea over the past 12,000 years. Lively controversy characterizes ongoing geological debate over the so-called Noah’s Flood hypothesis.

When I first heard Ryan and Pitman’s theory, back in the 1990s, it made sense to me. It sounded like a reasonable explanation for the story of Noah’s Flood. However, at the time I didn’t know about the Sumerian tablets identifying Ziusudra as the last king of Shurrupak before a Mesopotamian flood. I now believe that there is no way to tell whether Noah’s Flood was the Black Sea flood or a major Mesopotamian flood. No matter how intriguing either idea may sound, both offer seemingly reasonable explanations.

Wherever they came from, the first farmers arrived in southern Mesopotamia shortly after the filling of the Black Sea. Sumerian cities sitting on the undisturbed ruins of these first farming towns without any archaeological evidence of distinct breaks in culture suggest that these early farmers were the ancestors of the Sumerians. Did they bring the story of a great flood that destroyed their world with them when they fled to Mesopotamia from an ancestral homeland now at the bottom of the Black Sea? If so, periodic flooding would have reinforced the tradition of a great flood among those living on the low ground between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Creationists quickly denounced Ryan and Pitman’s claim of scientific support of the biblical flood. This was not their global deluge. Grand as it was, the Black Sea flood could not be Noah’s Flood; it was still too puny. An influential creationist website even accused Ryan and Pitman of trying to destroy the Bible. Other creationists simply maintained that Satan had clouded the minds of those denying the reality of a global flood.

There was a time when both geologists and conservative Christians would have interpreted the evidence of a catastrophic Black Sea flood as proof of Noah’s Flood and confirmation of the historical veracity of Genesis. But times have changed. Now geologists present evidence in support of Noah’s Flood, and creationists hold out for belief in a global flood for which no evidence can be found. Yet, who’s to say that the original Noah wasn’t among those living in the area now submerged beneath the Black Sea? At this point an answer lies beyond the reach of geological, archaeological or historical inquiry. To those with opinions about such things, the truth remains a matter of faith.

12

Phantom Deluge

I
HAVE OFTEN WONDERED
how creationists could reject a whole series of independent scientific advances, from the coherent order of species in the fossil record to radiometric dating and plate tectonics. Even more curious is how they reject science even when it appears to support the historical veracity of scripture. The key to understanding modern creationist thinking lies in understanding the influence of John Whitcomb and Henry Morris. Shocked by what they saw as the bending of God’s Word to the whims of science, these two men wrote the book that launched the modern revival of young-Earth creationism.

In 1948, Whitcomb was a Princeton ancient and European history major who converted to evangelical Christianity in his freshman year. Following graduation, Whitcomb enrolled in Grace Theological Seminary, a fundamentalist school in Winona Lake, Indiana, where he later taught the Old Testament and Hebrew. This combative young Bible teacher, the son of General Patton’s chief of staff, considered endorsement of an old Earth and a local Flood to be an abominable folly rooted in uncritical acceptance of uniformitarian geology.