Black Sea deluge theory

The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BCE due to waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosporus Strait. The hypothesis made headlines when The New York Times published it in December 1996, shortly before it was published in an academic journal.NYT 1996 While it is agreed that the sequence of events described did occur, there is debate over the suddenness, dating and magnitude of the events. Two opposing hypotheses have arisen to explain the rise of the Black Sea: gradual and oscillating.Yanko-Hombach et al. 2007 The oscillating hypothesis specifies that over the last 30,000 years, water has intermittently flowed back and forth between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea in relatively small magnitudes, and does not necessarily presuppose that there occurred any sudden "refilling" events.
==Flood hypothesis==
In 1997, William Ryan and Walter Pitman published evidence that a massive flooding of the Black Sea occurred about 5600 BCE through the Bosporus, following this scenario.Ryan and Pitman 1997. Before that date, glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes draining into the Aegean Sea. As glaciers retreated, some of the rivers emptying into the Black Sea declined in volume and changed course to drain into the North Sea.National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Climate History: Exploring Climate Events and Human Development" The levels of the lakes dropped through evaporation, while changes in worldwide hydrology caused sea level to rise. The rising Mediterranean finally spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosporus. The event flooded of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. According to the researchers, "Ten cubic miles [42 km3] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls... The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."
Samplings of sediments in the Black Sea by a series of expeditions carried out between 1998 and 2005 in the frame of a European Project ASSEMBLAGE. and coordinated by a French oceanographer, Gilles Lericolais,. brought some new inputs to the Ryan and Pitman's hypothesis. These results were also completed by the Noah project led by the Bulgarian Institute of Oceanography (IO-BAS).. Furthermore, calculations made by Mark Siddall predicted an underwater canyon that was actually found.Nature 2004
===Criticism===
While some geologists claim it as fact that the sequence of events described did occur, there is debate over their suddenness and magnitude. In particular, if the water level of the Black Sea had initially been higher, the effect of the spillover would have been much less dramatic. A large part of the academic geological community also continues to reject the idea that there could have been enough sustained long-term pressure by water from the Aegean to dig through a supposed isthmus at the present Bosporus, or enough of a difference in water levels (if at all) between the two water basins,
Countering the hypothesis of Ryan and Pitman are data collected prior to its publication by Ukrainian and Russian scientists including Valentina Yanko-Hombach, who claims that the water flow through the Bosporus repeatedly reversed direction over geological time depending on fluctuation in the levels of the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. This contradicts the hypothesized catastrophic breakage of a Bosporus sill. Likewise, the water levels calculated by Yanko-Hombach differed widely from those hypothesized by Ryan and Pitman.
In 2007, a research anthology on the topic was published which makes available much of the earlier Russian research in English for the first time, and combines it with more recent scientific findings.
A five-year cross-disciplinary research project under the sponsorship of UNESCO and the International Union of Geological Sciences was conducted 2005–9..
A February 2009 article reported that the flooding might have been "quite mild".National Geographic News 2009
According to a study by Giosan et al.,. the level in the Black Sea before the marine reconnection was 30 m below present sea level, rather than the 80 m, or lower, of the catastrophe theories. If the flood occurred at all, the sea level increase and the flooded area during the reconnection were significantly smaller than previously proposed. It also occurred earlier than initially surmised, ca. 7400 BCE, rather than the originally proposed 5600 BCE. Since the depth of the Bosphorus, in its middle furrow, at present varies from 36 to 124 m, with an average depth of 65 m, a calculated stone age shoreline in the Black Sea lying 30 m lower than in the present day would imply that the contact with the Mediterranean may never have been broken during the Holocene, and hence that there could have been no sudden waterfall-style transgression.
==Evidence from archaeology==
Although neolithic agriculture had by that time already reached the Pannonian plain, Ryan and Pittman link its spread with people displaced by the postulated flood. More recent examinations by oceanographers such as Teofilo A. "Jun" Abrajano Jr. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Canadian colleague Ali Aksu of Memorial University of Newfoundland have cast some doubt on this linkage. Abrajano's team, finding sapropel mud deposits in the Sea of Marmara which are today associated with freshwater outflow over top of salt-water inflow, have concluded that there has been sustained fresh water outflow from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean for at least 10 000 years.Aksu et al. 2002 In 2003, Michael Sperling Sperling et al. 2003 concluded that the Black Sea was not a major freshwater source contributing to formation of the Marmara Sapropel S1. Aksu found an underwater delta south of the Bosporus; evidence for a strong flow of fresh water out of the Black Sea in the 8th millennium BCE.New Scientist. 2004 Nevertheless, Erkan GökaşanGökaşan et al. 2005 and later Kadir ErisEris et al. 2008 demonstrated that the development of the delta is clearly associated with the Kurbağalı Stream on the east coast, and not with the Black Sea outflow through the strait.
In a series of expeditions, a team of marine archeologists led by Robert Ballard identified what appeared to be ancient shorelines, freshwater snail shells, drowned river valleys, tool-worked timbers, and man-made structures in roughly 300 feet (100 m) of water off the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Although radiocarbon dating of freshwater mollusk remains indicated an age of about 7 500 years, radiocarbon dating in freshwater mollusks in particular can be inaccurate.Keith and Anderson 1 963. "Evidence is presented to show that modern mollusk shells from rivers can have anomalous radiocarbon ages, owing mainly to incorporation of inactive (carbon-14-deficient) carbon from humus…" Such inaccuracies, however, are always in the direction of objects appearing older than they actually are (containing less 14C than expected), so the time given is a maximum age of a freshwater shoreline at that location.
== See also ==
* Deluge myth
* Noah's Ark
==Notes==
==References==
* Aksu, Ali E. et al. 2002. Persistent Holocene Outflow from the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean Contradicts Noah's Flood Hypothesis. GSA Today, May 2002, 12(5): 4–10. DOI 10.1130/1052-5173(2002)012<0004:PHOFTB>2.0.CO;2
* Sperling, M., Schmiedl, G., Hemleben, C., Emeis, K. C., Erlenkeuser, H., and Grootes, P. M. 2003. Black Sea impact on the formation of eastern Mediterranean sapropel S1? Evidence from the Marmara Sea. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 190, 9-21.
* Gökaşan, E., Algan, O., Tur, H., Meriç, E., Türker, A., and Şimşek, M. 2005. Delta formation at the southern entrance of Istanbul Strait (Marmara sea, Turkey): a new interpretation based on high-resolution seismic stratigraphy. Geo-Marine Letters 25, 370-377.
* Eris, K., Ryan, W. B. F., Cagatay, N., Sancar, Ü., Lericolais, G., Menot, G., and Bard, E. 2008.The timing and evolution of the post-glacial transgression across the Sea of Marmara shelf south of İstanbul. Marine Geology 243, 57-76.
* Dimitrov, Petko and Dimitrov, Dimitar. 2004. The Black Sea, the flood, and the ancient myths. Varna (Bulgaria): Slavena.
* Keith, M.L. and Anderson, G.M. 1963. Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with Mollusk Shells. Science, 1963 August 13, 141(3581): 634–637. DOI 10.1126/science.141.3581.634
* National Geographic News. 2009-02-06. "Noah's Flood" Not Rooted in Reality, After All?
* Nature. 2004 August 12. Noah's Flood. 430: 718-19
* New Scientist 2004 May 4. Flood hypothesis seems to hold no water. 2341: 13
*The New York Times. 1996-12-17. Geologists Link Black Sea Deluge to Farming's Rise. pages=B5, B13
* Ryan, W.B.F., Pitman III, W.C., et al. 1997. An abrupt drowning of the Black Sea shelf. Marine Geology, 138: 119–126.
* Yanko-Hombach, Valentina. 2007. The Black Sea Flood Question: Changes in Coastline, Climate and Human Settlement. Springer ISBN 1-4020-4774-6.
* Chepalyga A.L. The late glacial Great Flood in the Ponto-Caspian basin. In: The Black Sea Flood question: changes in coastline, climate and human settlement. Springer. 2006. pp.119-148 
==Further reading==
* Giosan, Liviu et al.. 2009. Was the Black Sea catastrophically flooded in the early Holocene? Quaternary Science Reviews, January 2009, 28(12-2): 1-6. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.10.012 This article (possibly not identical to the preceding citation), is available online with unrestricted access at the sponsoring institution's Web site, .
* Noah's Not-so-big Flood
* Lericolais, G. et al. 2009. High frequency sea level fluctuations recorded in the Black Sea since the LGM. Global and Planetary Change, March 2009, 66(1-2): 65-75
* "Ballard and the Black Sea"
* 
* Dimitrov, D. 2010. Geology and Non-traditional resources of the Black Sea. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-3-8383-8639-3. 244p.
==External links==
* The late glacial Great Flood in the Ponto-Caspian basin
Category:Flood myths
Category:Ancient History
Category:Turkey