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Ancient Black Sea Flood: Nuisance or Calamity?
Topic Started: Feb 25 2009, 12:58 AM (199 Views)
XNavyGunner
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Gunner

Something happened along the shores of the Black Sea about 9,500 years ago. According to one theory, a huge flood suddenly drowned the landscape, forcing some of the planet's first farmers to move elsewhere.

A new study paints a different picture.

"I would say there was never a big flood," said Liviu Giosan, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, Mass., and lead author of the study. "What we showed was that it's impossible."

The new work fuels an ongoing debate about the geologic history of the Black Sea. Research there has lagged behind other parts of the world, and many questions remain about how water levels have fluctuated over the years.

It's a unique place. The Black Sea is an inland sea, surrounded by Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. It was once a freshwater lake surrounded by rich and fertile plains. But about 9,500 years ago, sea levels rose as the climate warmed, and saltwater poured in from the Mediterranean through the Sea of Marmara.

The fossil record clearly shows a shift from freshwater to saltwater species around that time. Whether the change happened gradually or dramatically, however, is something scientists are still debating.

The details are murky because for decades, the Soviets carefully controlled who did what in the region, said Giosan, himself a native of Romania. Soviet-funded studies were published over the years, but the papers were short on details about study methods, making their conclusions unreliable.

In the mid-1990s, Columbia University geologist William Ryan teamed up with Russian and Turkish researchers to study the geology of the Black Sea for the first time with state-of-the-art methods. Based on seven key observations about the shorelines and fossil record, the team concluded that there had been a massive, catastrophic flood, which they dubbed "Noah's Flood." The theory has been controversial ever since.

Giosan and colleagues approached the question in a new way. Instead of looking underwater, like previous studies have done, they drilled a 42-meter (140-foot) hole in the Danube delta -- a flat plain that has formed out of sediments deposited by the Danube River as it pours into the Black Sea. Layer by layer, their core samples went back more than 10,000 years -- allowing the scientists to see what happened both before and after the flood.

By dating sediment layers as well as clam shells that were still closed shut (indicating that the animals were buried and preserved in the same place they lived), Giosan's group determined that the Black Sea was 30 meters (98 feet) below present its level at the time of the flood, not 80 meters (262 feet) as Ryan's team maintains. That suggests the flood was much smaller than originally thought.

"It moves the balance of evidence from this being a big, catastrophic event to its not being such a big event," said oceanographer Mark Siddall, of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

Ryan remains skeptical about the new paper, which he said depended largely on analyses of just two mollusk shells that were completely destroyed by the work, leaving no opportunity for the results to be replicated. Giosan said he has invited Ryan to join him in an effort to replicate and extend the results by drilling more cores in the Danube delta.

Now that the area is open for business, scientists hope that gaining a clearer picture of the Black Sea's past will help them get to the bottom of another important question: How much has climate change contributed to the region's history, and what does the future hold in store?

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Isis
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The Goddess of Darkness & Desire

Nice read Gunner..... :reading:
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Isis, The Goddess of Desire & Darkness. In The Darkness, We Find The Light.

This is a Drama Free Zone..!
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