The Biblical account of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood rides the line between fact and fiction, depending on your religious prejudices. Now, an acclaimed underwater archaeologist says that he has found evidence that the Biblical Flood may have actually happened after all.
Robert Ballard, one of the world’s best-known underwater archaeologists told ABC News that his team has been exploring the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey, searching for an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the purported time of Noah and the Biblical Flood. He says that 12,000 years ago, most of the world was covered in ice.
“Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that’s a big ice cube,” he said. “But then it started to melt. We’re talking about the floods of our living history.”
The ice began to melt, rushing into the oceans, and there you have your Biblical Flood. “The questions is, was there a mother of all floods,” Ballard said.
Following up on a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, Ballard set out to find evidence of a Black Sea-region mega-flood.
“We went in there to look for the flood,” he said. “Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed… The land that went under stayed under.”
About 400 feet below the surface, they found an ancient shoreline, which proves to Ballard that the Biblical Flood did indeed occur in the Black Sea region. He carbon dated shells at the shoreline, and said that he believes they have established a timeline of the event, which he believes happened around 5,000 BC.
“It probably was a bad day,” Ballard said. “At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under.”
The Biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood is not unique to the Bible. Many flood myths have been handed down in different cultures over time, long before the Noah story appeared in the Bible. Many archaeologists believe that such an event may have happened, even if it doesn’t strictly match up to legendary accounts.
Next, Ballard hopes to find more evidence of civilizations in the sea, which he calls the “largest museum on Earth.”
“It’s foolish to think you will ever find a ship,” Ballard said, referring to the Ark. “But can you find people who were living? Can you find their villages that are underwater now? And the answer is yes.”
Do you think that the Biblical Flood of Noah’s time actually happened?
