Hudson Museum Lecture Addresses New Noah’s Flood Theories
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — A discussion about some “incredible scientific sleuthing” that resulted in archaeological evidence of a sensational flood 7,600 years ago, which created the Black Sea, is the subject of a public lecture Oct. 8 at Minsky Recital Hall at the University of Maine.
Dr. Walter Pitman, special research scientist at the Lamont Doherty Observatory at Columbia University, also will pose questions about whether that flood may have been the one described in the Book of Genesis and the source of Noah’s Flood.
His lecture, titled “Evidence for and Implication of the Black Sea Noah’s Flood: Geology, Archaeology, Language and Myth,” begins at 7 p.m. The lecture is free.
In the 1990s, Pitman, a geophysicist, and Dr. William Ryan, an oceanographer at Columbia, scientifically documented evidence of a cataclysmic flood that refilled the Mediterranean basin and turned the Garden of Eden into a “sea of death.”
Pitman and Ryan detail their findings in their book “Noah’s Flood,” published by Simon & Schuster in 1999.
Basing their conclusions largely on soil samples and other evidence from the bed of the Mediterranean and Black seas, the two marine geologists hypothesize that “this cataclysmic event, in which the Atlantic Ocean burst through the Strait of Gibraltar and refilled the Mediterranean basin, turned a Garden of Eden into a sea of death. The Black Sea people fled, never to return, migrating as far as Western Europe, Central Asia, China, Egypt and the Persian Gulf.”
Ryan and Pitman speculate that the former inhabitants and their descendants, through oral traditions, preserved the memory of the traumatic flood, which they say may have been the source of Noah’s Flood.
Flooding most likely was caused by melting ice caps, which raised the levels of ocean’s as much as 300 feet, causing the Atlantic to breach the Strait of Gibraltar, previously dry land, according to Harold Borns, UMaine professor of geological sciences and quaternary studies. Borns calls the research “incredible scientific sleuthing.”
The New York Times in 1999 wrote about Pitman and Ryan’s theories: “While the authors have yet to win over skeptics of the Black Sea flood’s possibly sweeping influence on history, other scientists have weighed in with new findings that seem to confirm the fact of the flood itself.
“In about 5600 BCE, with rising global sea levels, salt water from the Mediterranean and Aegean seas apparently burst into the Black Sea, then a landlocked freshwater lake. The Black Sea rose with terrifying swiftness, inundating more than 60,000 square miles of coastal plains and giving the body of water its current size and configuration,” the Times wrote.
Among the scientists expressing interest in Pitman and Ryan’s theory is oceanographer Robert Ballard of Titanic-exploration fame. The search for archaeological evidence of Noah’s biblical ark continues in the mountains of the region, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
The lecture is sponsored by the Hudson Museum and the Climate Change Institute at UMaine. Information is available on the Hudson Museum website: www.umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum.