Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
It has been suggested that this jump in sea level catastrophically breached the low ridge
of the Bosporus, spilling the Mediterranean into a low-lying freshwater lake in the Black
Sea basin. This event would have submerged almost 28,000 square miles and topped the
lake up to sea level. This may have submerged some of the earliest farming communities,
sending refuges off in all directions.
In the spring of 1969 the oceanographic research vessel
Atlantis II
found a remarkable
layer of organic matter in the bed of the Black Sea. Sandwiched as the middle of three dis-
tinct sedimentary layers, the black mud recorded how a former sea turned into a freshwater
lake and then back into a sea. In some places half of the curious black mud was composed
of plant and animal remains. The organic muck lay atop unusual gray clay with fresh water
in its pores. The saltwater fauna of the lowest layer was replaced by freshwater organisms,
which were then replaced by saltwater species sometime later. Apparently, the Black Sea
had been a freshwater lake when the sea level was lower and rivers were swollen with gla-
cial meltwater. Then an influx of seawater shifted the bottom of the water body from well
oxygenated to stagnant, oxygen-poor conditions. When did this happen? Radiocarbon dat-
ing of the organic matter in the strange layer of black mud indicated that the rush of seawa-
ter occurred about seven thousand years ago.
In 1972 the Victoria Institute, a Christian society established in 1865 with the professed
mission to reconcile apparent discrepancies between the latest geological findings and
scripture, held a symposium on Noah's Flood. There, British Bible-science enthusiast
Robert Clark suggested that the biblical flood deposited the organic-rich mud at the bottom
of the Black Sea. Perhaps the sea level rose enough to spill into the Black Sea when a large
piece of Antarctic ice calved into the sea, or when a volcano erupted beneath the ice cap.
However it happened, Clark thought the stagnant conditions at the bottom of the Black Sea
ensured preservation of a flooded landscape deep below the surface. Few took seriously his
suggestion that Noah's hometown might lay entombed beneath the mud of the Black Sea.
Yet since antiquity we've known water flows both ways between the Mediterranean and
Black seas. The lighter, fresher water of the Black Sea flows out above a reverse current
of denser salt water that flows from the Mediterranean along the bottom. Up until the in-
vention of steam power, mariners traveling upstream to the Black Sea pulled themselves
through the Dardanelles and Bosporus by lowering baskets full of stones down into the
