Robert Ballard, one of the world's most famous underwater explorers, has set his sights on proving the existence of one of the Bible's most well known stories.

In an interview with ABC's Christiane Amanpour the archaeologist who discovered the Titanic discussed his findings from his search in Turkey for evidence of a civilization swept away by a monstrous ancient flood. Continued...

Ballard does not think he will ever find Noah's Ark, but he does think he may find evidence of a people whose entire world was washed away about 7,000 years ago. He and his team said they plan to return to Turkey next summer.

"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."

Onyx8 wrote:A flood, not THE flood.

He is not a total numpty. Bad reporting.

Underwater Archaeology in Black Sea Proves Plato Was Right
Time for Some Re-Thinking
Sept. 13, 2000—Explorers in an undersea discovery craft came upon remnants of human habitation 311-feet below the surface of the Black Sea, approximately 12 miles off the Turkish shoreline, near the port city of Sinop. The well-preserved remnants of a mud and wattle house are thought to be part of a human settlement at the intersection of two great rivers, dating to a time before the flooding of the Black Sea by the waters of the Mediterranean, an event which probably occurred about 7,500 years before present as a result of glacial ice melt.

Just a quick climate-based question. If all of the water in the atmosphere was rained onto the planet at once, until it was all in in the sea, how much would sea levels actually rise? I'm gonna have a guess that it wouldn't be to the top of Everest.

One estimate of the volume of water in the atmosphere at any one time is ... but it is only about 0.001 percent of the total Earth's water volume of

Macdoc wrote:Sorry but you are incorrect. There have been very few events that could put a town 310' under water.
That's an event that legends spring from and Noah's Ark is just one of those.

The break through of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea would have appeared to be the end of the world to anyone in or near the zone. Denying there are roots in myths is as dogmatically wrong headed as the sky daddy types that take the twisted over time version as eye witness accounts.

Macdoc wrote:Only one is big enough to generate a long tale and who knows how it circulated through the region via song and word of mouth.
The trading region was extensive and the Black Sea a major route from the Med to the North.
Who cares.....pick one if you say there are but I daresay you would be hard pressed to find another of that scale short of the Atlantic busting into the Med and that was a while back.

Macdoc wrote:You got another explanation for a village 100 meters underwater?

One apparent piece of supporting evidence—the discovery of the remains of a wood-and-mud house littered about with
stone tools 91 meters beneath the Black Sea (Science , 22 September 2000, p. 2021)—has not panned out. “It looks peculiar,” says Gilbert, but there’s no sign it’s anything more than a random bunch of rocks and sticks.

Stratigraphic and paleo-geomorphologic information from Danube delta aided by radiocarbon ages on articulated mollusks constrain the level in the Black Sea before the marine reconnection to ca 30 m below the present sea level rather than 80 m or lower. If the flood occurred at all, the sea level increase and the flooded area during the reconnection were significantly smaller than previously proposed.

Macdoc wrote:You got another explanation for a village 100 meters underwater?

klazmon wrote:

From 2009:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9108002928

Stratigraphic and paleo-geomorphologic information from Danube delta aided by radiocarbon ages on articulated mollusks constrain the level in the Black Sea before the marine reconnection to ca 30 m below the present sea level rather than 80 m or lower. If the flood occurred at all, the sea level increase and the flooded area during the reconnection were significantly smaller than previously proposed.

Macdoc wrote:You got another explanation for a village 100 meters underwater?