- NEW YORK (AP) - What?! New scientific proof demonstrating that the great
biblical flood actually did occur thousands of years ago?
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- Such is the sensational but speculative
implication in the new book "Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries
About the Event That Changed History" (Simon & Schuster, $25)
by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. The authors are adjunct geology professors
at Columbia University and senior scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory.
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- Some biblical fundamentalists have expended
great energy searching for the remains of Noah's ark. However, before they
break out the non-alcoholic champagne to celebrate, they should know that
the two scientists see no evidence for a worldwide deluge in line with
a strictly literal reading of Genesis 7.
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- But geological research does find reason
to believe there was indeed a vast, sudden and deadly flood around 5,600
B.C., close enough to the possible time of Noah to fascinate biblical literalists
and liberals alike.
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- The Ryan-Pitman scenario was first publicized
in a British television documentary in 1996. The following year they laid
out the technical data in the journal Marine Geology, but that scientific
report avoided the all-important links with the biblical flood that are
central to the current book.
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- Till now the best stab at modern scientific
corroboration of the flood was the work of British archaeologist Charles
Leonard Woolley, who caused a sensation with his 1929 book "Ur of
the Chaldees," said to be the most widely read archaeology book ever
published.
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- Digging in present-day Iraq at the site
of ancient Ur, birthplace of the first patriarch Abraham, the Bible-believing
Woolley found an ancient blanket of waterborne silt without human remains.
It was evidence of a deadly flood that appeared to substantiate Genesis.
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- But Ryan and Pitman say later scholars
learned that this silt layer covered only a few square miles. Thus it was
no more significant than many other localized floods in the region of the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
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- The Ryan-Pitman candidate for the great
flood locale is what we know as the Black Sea, bordering Turkey to the
north. In 1993, Ryan and Pitman joined a Russian expedition on the Black
Sea and used the latest technology to examine evidence of geological patterns,
soil layers and forms of aquatic life that existed in ancient times.
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- One telltale clue: Freshwater mollusks
with smashed shells gave way to saltwater creatures that had intact shells,
a biological transition that could be dated through carbon-14 testing of
the shell remains.
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- From such research, the scientists spin
this scenario:
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- Until about 5600 B.C. the Black Sea was
an inland fresh-water lake, considerably smaller than today's saltwater
sea and lying far below the level of the Mediterranean Sea. Then the sea
waters broke through a natural dam that existed at the Bosporus strait,
the waterway adjoining present-day Istanbul.
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- The flood was unusually sudden, powerful
and deadly because sea waters were driven by the full force of the Mediterranean.
It lasted a long time because all the world's oceans continually pushed
in new water to keep the Mediterranean at constant sea level.
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- By their calculations, the water would
have rushed through at 50 mph with the power of Niagara Falls 200 times
over. The waters inundated farmlands and drove the surviving inhabitants
into other regions, including the areas to the south where flood stories
were to be written down.
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- Surely, the authors contend, such a radical
and frightening flood would have been burned into the permanent memory
of the survivors and succeeding generations.
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- But the weak link in their theory comes
right there. Could the flood story have been preserved for thousands of
years before it reached the form we know from the biblical Genesis and
the similar narrative in pagan Babylon's Gilgamesh epic?
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- The geologists think that's not a stretch;
others will doubtless disagree.
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- Biblical purists will note that Noah's
flood was caused by rainfall, not the onrushing oceans depicted by the
geologists. Also the biblical flood was temporary, not permanent as in
the new theory.
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- Further input from Bible experts would
have made this book even more intriguing. Among the matters Ryan and Pitman
do not explore:
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- Is there any correlation between the
"mountains of Ararat" where Noah's ark eventually hit ground,
according to Genesis 8:4, and the peak known as Mount Ararat in present-day
Turkey, not all that far from the shores of the Black Sea?
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- And does their estimate that the Black
Sea surge lasted for 300 days have some relation to the nearly identical
ten-month period in Genesis 8:5 between the start of Noah's flood and the
receding of the waters?
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