The Real Landscapes of the Great Flood Myths
Analyzing sediment cores from the bed of the Black Sea, they discovered that before 5600 B.C., the sea was a large freshwater lake. Then, when glacial ice melting off the poles raised sea levels worldwide, the Mediterranean overtopped a narrow strip of land and decanted into the lake. The inflow “roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days,” the researchers write in their book Noah’s Flood, cascading over the land at 200 times the flow of Niagara Falls.
.. Saint Augustine, a fourth-century bishop in a Roman province of Africa, warned against readings of the Bible that conflicted with reason and the study of nature. In his view, the earth didn’t lie. When he found seashells encased in mountain rock, he took them as confirmation of a global flood. How else could the bodies of marine creatures get locked up in mountaintops?