Origin of the Black Sea
The Black Sea was once part of a larger body of water that included the Caspian and Aral seas. About 22,000 years ago the Black Sea began its life as a fresh-water lake. However, it appears that some seven to nine thousand years ago, due perhaps to melting glaciers and polar ice-caps, sea levels rose causing the salty Mediterranean Sea to catastrophically break through the Bosphorus. From this event the Black Sea took its present form.
The dead lower layer may thus have been formed when the denser salt-water flooded in, when it would have plunged straight to the bottom.
Evidence for the flooding
Without doubt, some catastrophic event did occur some 7,500 years ago. The depth of the sea seems to have increased by some 100 metres over about a year. This caused an increase in the area of the Black Sea, with local flooding around its edges. This has been confirmed by archaeological investigations, especially off the Turkish coast. In a series of expeditions, marine archeologists led by Robert Ballard identified what appeared to be ancient shorelines, freshwater snail shells, drowned river valleys and tool-worked timbers at roughly 100 m of water. Radiocarbon dating of the remains of freshwater molloscs indicated an age of about 7,000 years.
What was the nature of the flooding?
Lovers of the supernatural like to claim that this was due to the deluge, a period during which it rained for 40 days and nights, flooding the whole Earth, as described in the events of Noah’s Flood in the Bible, and in the Epics of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis. The oldest version of the Flood is the Sumarian, recorded on a fragment of a tablet, discovered in ancient Nippur, which dates most probably to before 2000 BC.
So these and many other historical sources do seem to indicate that there was in fact a flood of some sort or other several thousand years ago. But as to this flooding being that which occurred when the present Black Sea was formed, that is quite another question. There has thus been much written about this topic, much of it pure guesswork, but let us look at just one simple fact.
If the rate of rise of the sea level was 100 metres for some 300 days, or perhaps up to two years, many people would eventually have been displaced, and much agricultural land lost.
However, this could hardly be called a catastrophic event as compared to an earthquake or volcanic eruption where people cannot escape in time, and are overwhelmed. For example, the dire events at Pompeii or Heraclitum, or even the recent tsunami event in South East Asia can really be called catastrophic. To put it in practical terms, the sea level may perhaps have risen some 23 cm per day i.e. less than a centimetre per hour. Hardly something you would call catastrophic except perhaps in the long run.
Apart from the indisputable scientific evidence, all modern critical Bible scholars, to quote the editor of the Biblical Archeology Review, regard the tale of Noah as legendary. The flood story should therefore primarily be seen as a moral text not a historical text.
This excessive flooding has often been referred to as the great mythological flood mentioned in the story of Noah’s Ark (Chapter 6-9 in Book of Genesis) where God decided to return the Earth to its initial stage by wiping out the corruption and violence from the surface of the earth. Noah was to build an ark which he would use to save his sons and their wives and a pair of male and female of every creature on the earth.
However, Fundementalist Christians claim that Noah’s flood was not a local flood in the Black Sea but was a world-wide flood that has left its mark on every continent on the planet. This is hardly likely, though, as this would require the sudden production and following disappearance of three times more water than is contained in all the Earth’s oceans.
So, it appears to have been a natural event and not the result of some supernatural intervention. But of course, this won’t stop people still trying to associate Noah’s flood with this event.
Source
https://xray-mag.com/content/black-sea-place-myth-and-mystery
https://www.maritimemanual.com/facts-about-the-black-sea/
Author: Giuglea Raul – President of ECOM
