Black Sea site of biblical flood? (01/11/98)

Black Sea site of biblical flood?

by Walter Derzko

TORONTO - Chornobyl was not the first catastrophe to hit Ukraine.

"Quirks & Quarks," a CBC radio program in Canada, in mid-December 1997 aired an interesting interview with Dr. Walter Pitman, a professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, about the Great Flood cited in the Bible.

He has evidence that the flood probably happened in the Black Sea about 7,000 years ago as water from melting icecaps broke through the Bosporous Strait with a tremendous surge, estimated at 100 cubic kilometers of water per day.

Flood waters advanced up rivers in what is now Ukraine at a rate of one mile per day. The inhabitants fleeing from the surging waters probably moved all through Europe via what today are Italy, Germany, Poland and right through the Paris delta.

In the Black Sea, water levels are suspected to have risen six inches per day or the equivalent of one year of water going over Niagara Falls in a two-day span or 100 cubic kilometers per day. (See "Noah's Flood" in New Scientist, October 4, 1997, pp. 24-27.)

The CBC's webpage notes that Dr. Pitman said the evidence he has found of this ancient flood of the Black Sea might well explain the emergence of flood myths in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh. His book "Noah's Journey" will be published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 1998. (See the CBC's web page, at http://www.radio.cbc.ca, where an audio of the program is available for downloading.)