The birth of the Mediterranean
About twenty years ago, the first time I heard about how the modern Mediterranean had formed, I was gobsmacked. Here’s a video that tells the tale, with some visuals. In recent years, geologists have added that the filling of the Mediterranean actually happened much much more quickly than originally thought, and more quickly than this video says. At around 4:44, it states that the filling took thousands of years – but in fact, research completed just a little while after the video was made indicated that the filling apparently took less than two years.
Two Years. Sufficient time for proto-Levantines to make a killing in sea-floor real estate and then, well, Levant.
That giant waterfall would be something to see though. Perhaps Time Travel *was* invented in the Ur-2020 and someone went back to see it and stepped on a butterfly.
An interesting story.
Regards — Cliff
The Grand Canyon was formed (cut) much quicker than the thousands of years portrayed in a Flintstone cartoon, also.
Check out the movie “Is Genesis History?”
The evidence of a global flood is overwhelming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM82qxxskZE
Interesting! I’ve also seen accounts of the rapid filling of the Black Sea through the Bosporus.
Kate,
Yes I have too. Robert Ballard (of Titanic fame) claimed that some of his undersea work in the Black Sea actually shows evidence of human habitation which is now underwater. He theorized that perhaps the filling of the Black Sea was caused by global melting of glaciers causing sea levels to rise and filling the basin that is now the Black Sea. He speculated as to whether this could have been the source of the biblical flood epic. By way of coincidence, I have heard the late Joseph Campbell point out that a great flood epic appears in all major religions, and reminds us that all major religions have their origin in the east. Coincidence?
Wow!
I think I’ve now heard of about 4 big floods (the Black Sea being seemingly the best candidate for Noah/Utnapishtim, due to timing and location) that people speculate could have combined to provide a basis for our worldwide inclination towards global flood epics.
I wonder how many more we’ll find out about, as the years roll by?
But, I don’t suppose that the flood that filled the Med is likely to have been one of them. The “Zanclean flood,” coming 5.33 million years ago, seems a mite early as a basis for the folklore of homo sapiens. I think you’d need something within the last fifty thousand years. A million years I could just barely buy, at a stretch, but with five you’d be talking about people (if that’s the word?) who rarely even used rocks as tools, and probably lacked fire.
And noah was there to witness it… heh..
My father’s area of study was Old Testament History and Semitic languages, and he took me with him on his sabbatical in 1957 to drive around Turkey. 10,000 miles in 3 months, from south to north and west to east and back. Traveling with us was Dr. Kramer, one of the world’s four Sumerologists.
It was a real eye-opener for a 14 year old boy to watch Dr Kramer walk up to a stone gate carved with an inscription commemorating the passage of some ancient conquerer, and read the inscription as if he was reading the headlines in the Times.
But the point I really wanted to make is that we got to Lake Van, far in the east, and in a military area that was closed to foreigners. Without Dr. Kramer, we would not have been able to get permission to travel there.
Mt. Ararat is just north of Lake Van, and we were teated to tales from local scholars who explained how Noah’s ark landed on Mt. Ararat. Now, as it turns out, the view that Noah’s ark landed on Mt. Ararat is gaining more currency. There is even someone who claims to have found remains — a position that seems like wishful thinking as much as good scholarship.
But it was still an amazing trip for me.
Back in 2014 I read Noah’s Flood by William Ryan and Walter Pitman, published in 1998. Using evidence from the Mediterranean and Black Sea seabeds, they seemed to make a strong case for the Black Sea being a large lake with settlements around it that filled in when Mediterranean water broke through the Bosporus area, approximately 5600 BCE.
Then more recently (but I don’t recall any details) I saw a comment that new evidence disproved their thesis. Last I understand, we are back to some variant on periodic flooding in Mesopotamia being the source of the flood story. Unless someone has a good recent reference for an alternative?
The cart ruts of Malta have always fascinated me.
T, based on the seismic activity in the area, my guess is an earthquake created a fissure which allowed the water to pour through the Bosporus. The rising water in general comes from glacial melt. The islands in the Adriatic off the Croatian coast are the tops of foothills, with the valleys now submerged and the higher mountains on the mainland.
F,
Wow! Traveling so extensively in that area in 1957! Must have been an amazing adventure.
Thanks for posting, Neo. I really enjoyed that. Hopefully I’ll find time to write more on this post, later, but if I don’t I wanted to let you know I appreciated that animation and narration. Very well done.
Thanks for positing this. Fascinating.
I recall a Scientific American article of some decades ago which described research on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. Many deep bore holes gave indication that the Mediterranean was desiccated and then flooded multiple times over millions of years.
Another interesting store is the Scablands in the NW USA. Lake Missoula was formed by ice dams, and when they broke at the end of the ice age (multiple times) there was a great flood released that roared westward to the Pacific.
The mirror image of this story is that of Ice Age Lake Missoula. The N.A. ice shelf blocked river flow in what is now Western Montana. A lake, a bit larger than Lake Erie, formed. Eventually there was enough water to lift the ice dam holding the lake, which then emptied in an estimated two weeks. The flood water inundated Eastern Washington, eventually flowing through the Columbia River gorge and into the Pacific. Some current estimates are that this process repeated itself 20-25 times.
The original theory was proposed in the 20’s by geologist Harlen Bretz.
@Bill M:The flood water inundated Eastern Washington, eventually flowing through the Columbia River gorge and into the Pacific.
The repeated (40-ish) floods cut through three ranges: Wallula Gap in the Horse Heaven Hills, Sentinel Gap in the Saddle Mountains, and the Gorge itself through the Cascades.
Commenters Edward, Bill M., and Frederick have mentioned the Missoula floods making the scablands in Eastern Washington, and Harlen Bretz, the geologist who first proposed the floods. The poobahs of geology poked fun at Bretz’s theory for decades, but finally accepted it.
Bretz’s Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood. From the Amazon rev.:
Bretz was one more Midwestern farmboy who made great contributions to STEM. He lived a long productive life, close to 100 years.
I just started Irving Finkel’s “The Ark Before Noah,” about the somewhat similar “how did the Black Sea suddenly fill” story, and if the first chapter is any indication, it’s going to be a pure delight. I’m going to poke around and see what else this talented writer and storyteller has published. He’s clearly an ancient-languages geek of the first order, but a sparkling wit even so.