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Noah's
Flood, The New Scientific Discoveries
About The Event That Changed The World; William Ryan & Walter
Pitman, Simon & Schuster 1999
ISBN0-684-81052-2
From
Scientific American
The tale of a massive, devastating flood
appears not only in the Bible but also in other
ancient writings, often in similar terms, suggesting
that it records a real and singularly memorable
event. Ryan and Pitman, who are senior scientists at
Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory, think the event might have been a huge
and prolonged cascade of water from the
Mediterranean that broke through a natural dam in
the Bosporus Strait and plunged into what was then a
freshwater lake and is now the Black Sea. They
present both geologic and archaeological evidence
for the flood, dating it at about 5600 B.C.
"The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full
spate for at least three hundred days," they
write. The cascade inundated 60,000 square miles of
land, forcing the people living in the region to
disperse. The book explores the question of who
those people were and where they went; it also
examines the tradition of oral storytelling that
could have passed the flood story from generation to
generation. |
