Back to Ian Plimer and the Great Flood

Not quite week ago, I promised myself I would dig around and find out more about Ian Plimer's reference to a great flood that happened about 7,600 years ago. I tried various permutations of search terms on Google and all I came up with was leftie ridicule accusing Plimer of being a Bible thumper. Surprise. Surprise.

Only last night did I have a Duh! moment when it occurred to me to actually check out Plimer's book Heaven and Earth itself, which I am slowly reading through (Ya, I know. I spend way to much time in the blogosphere). And sure enough, he deals with it on pages 296 to 298. Sorry, it's a long one, but here it is (emphasis throughout is mine):

"During an exceptionally cold period 8500 to 8000 years ago, the Anatolian highland people moved to a lower altitude. The Anatolian highlands were deserted and populations shifted to a 160,000 square kilometre basin with a warmer wetter climate. This basin is now occupied by the Black Sea. This protected basin was serviced by melt water rivers (Don, Dnieper, Danube) and comprised two large freshwater lakes and fertile plains. It became the breadbasket of the ancient world.

Almost 25% of the floor of the modern Black Sea is flat and less than 100 metres below sea level. During the last glaciation, the Sakarya River drained the basin into the Mediterranean Sea via the Gulf of Izmit and the Sea of Marmara. This kept the Marmara Sea out of the basin. However, the post-glacial sea level rise meant that the Marmara Sea level was about 100 metres higher than the floor off the Black Sea basin. At that time, there was no Bosphorus, just a low valley with a rock outcrop at its headwaters that protected the basin from inundation by the Marmara sea.

However, the area is at a plate boundary where Africa is colliding with Europe, and the North Anatolian Fault regularly moves. The last movement on 17 August 1999 caused 20,000 fatalities. Movement along the North Anatolian Fault 7600 years ago resulted in the breaking of the rocks and a rush of water down from the Marmara Sea into the Black Sea basin. This process of forming the Black Sea took no longer than two years. Seawater poured into the basin with the force of 200 Niagara Falls, sea level rose by 15 cm per day and the shoreline advanced kilometres per day.

Marine sediments deposited from turbulent waters were deposited on fertile soils, dense salty water filled the bottom of the Black Sea displacing fresher water to the surface, and the bottom waters of the Black Sea became oxygen-poor. This was fortunate as it allowed the preservation of wooden village structures that were built on the shore of the former freshwater lakes.

This must have been a terrifying event. People and livestock perished, populations dispersed and the survivors carried with them their language, culture and knowledge of agriculture, animal husbandry, craftsmanship and metallurgy. It is no surprise that many cultures have myths about a great flood. Post-glacial sea level rise of 130 metres over the last 14,000 years, floods and catastrophic events such as inundation of the Black Sea basin were passed down as stories whereas the comings and goings of daily life were not.

Drill cores from coral reefs from the same period show that the great flood that formed the Black Sea was not a global event. Attempts to interpret the Black Sea flooding event were passed down from generation to generation. These appear as culturally and linguistically transposed stories. They appeared as a fragmentary Sumerian story written some 2000 years later in 3400 BC, the Mesopotamian myth of Athrahasis, the Bablyonian tale of Ut-napishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek stories of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the story of Dardanus, and the biblical story of Noah and the great flood.

These changes to what was considered a static world were so rapid and incomprehensible that the great flood to form the Black Sea was interpreted as the action of a god who flooded the known world in order to rid it of evil. So too with the modern world, which many interpret as static. The slightest change in Nature is viewed as a message that we humans are changing the climate, that this is evil and that we must rid the world of this evil. To many, it is incomprehensible that Nature can change the planet or that humans are an insignificant short-lived recent terrestrial vertebrate living on a planet where natural forces are many orders of magnitude greater than any human force. The amount and rate of measured modern changes in temperature and sea level are far slower than post-glacial processes. This is not in accord with the beliefs of many who claim that humans are driving global warming and sea level rise."

Funny isn't it. Before science was able to explain events like this, humans interpreted such events as the act of a vengeful god. Nowadays, we have a group of humans who have replaced such "archaic" notions as God, and have accorded humans (Westerners, exclusively, of course) the equivalent status.

Plimer, BTW, is my new god. I'm a polytheist. My gods come and go with incredible speed.

(A previous entry about another event with equal or even greater catastrophic results.)