Megaflood

The story of a great flood is not the Bible's alone as there are many flood legends told by many different cultures all around the globe. That's because there really were massive floods that reshaped continents, though not the whole world.

As the Ice Age was winding down, and the glaciers retreated northward, they left behind massive ice formations that eventually acted as dams for great volumes of water. Eventually those dams failed and unimaginable torrents of water scalded the land on its way to the sea.

This is believed to have happened near the Black Sea in about 5000 BCE when the melting of North America's massive Laurentide Ice Sheet caused the Mediterranean Sea to overflow into the Black Sea. So much water flooded the region that researchers have found signs of human habitation 12 miles from the nearest coast in 300 feet of water. That's a lot of water but it wasn't an all-at-once flooding event, more like a steady rise in sea level that took about 30 years.

Is this the source of what came to be the story of the Great Flood? Probably, although somewhere lost in history some Phoenician merchantman acted as a floating zoo, eventually giving rise to the truly fantastical story of Noah's Ark.

=Lefty=