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In Search of Noah's Flood (How to Make a Mess o' Potamia)


Doug1066

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Ah. Retreated to an audience more tolerant of BS, eh? No one to gainsay you when there's no one left talking to you.

--Jaylemurph

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Taken in context, the big floods are not unusual.  They are merely 2000-year or 2500-year floods.  The 4100-year flood appears to be unique for the Holocene, a 10,000-year flood.  But during the 2500 years before the Holocene there were three bigger floods on the Nile.  During the Holocene there were three floods on the Nile almost as big as the 4100-year flood.

If the climate changed to favor big floods again, we might be seeing one of these every 800 years or so.  What would we think of them in that context?  How many of us are even aware of the Noahkian Flood that hit the Northwest Coast in 1862?  Not even the weather casters know about it.

Doug

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1 hour ago, jaylemurph said:

Ah. Retreated to an audience more tolerant of BS, eh? No one to gainsay you when there's no one left talking to you.

--Jaylemurph

The people here know what they're talking about (for the most-part.).

Doug

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The 4800BC date is wrong and the statement that there are two flood layers under the Mesopotamian plain is wrong, at east in most places.  But, otherwise, if we changed 4800 to 4100, it might fit.

I'm pretty sure the 4100BC flood is the one remembered as Noah's Flood, but there were a number of others back during the Ice Age that would make this one look small.

The top marking at Karnack might be remembering a real flood.

Doug

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There were six Ice Age floods on the Nile, all bigger than "Noah's Flood."  During the Holocene there were five super-floods, of which Noah's Flood in 4100BC was the largest.  Of the five, the 2920BC one was the smallest.  The 2920BC one is the one remembered on the Palermo Stone.  It happened during the reign of Semerket; although, there is no hieroglyphic record of exactly what the "disaster" was.

Still trying to figure out which flood caused the evulsion at Memphis.  The collapsed dam at Sadd al-Kafara was from the Third Dynasty, a trifling little flood.  The flood I was remembering in the other thread was First Dynasty (I had that right.) during the reign of Semerket, Sixth Pharaoh of the First Dynasty.

I suspect the Mesopotamian flood record is very similar to the Nile's as both are under control of the Indian Monsoon.  Still need better evidence for the 4100BC flood in Mesopotamia.  Suspect these floods also affected the Indus Valley, but can't be sure of that.  No evidence of super-floods in the Rhone Valley.

Now that I have tentatively identified the 4100BC flood as Noah's Flood, I need to learn more about this flood and what caused it.  Did it affect the Rhine, or Greece?  How much water are we talking about?

What do the legends say about it?  It occurred at the boundary between the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age.  That appears to be true in both Egypt and Mesopotamia.  Did anybody get a 14C date on it?  How about a piece of wood that can be cross-dated to an existing chronology?

Noticed that super-floods are more common during cold periods.  With global warming we won't see many in the future.  It has now been about 4940 years since the last super-flood.

Doug

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In North America, nearly all super-floods are Ice Age outburst floods.  Only one, the catastrophic draining of Lake Agassiz-Ojibway into Hudson's Bay, was Holocene (8470YBP).  In the Great Lakes there were the catastrophic draining of Lake Maumee into the Wabash, the catastrophic draining of Lake Arkona, the catastrophic draining of Lake Iroquois down the Hudson, the catastrophic draining of Lake Agassiz once down the Mississippi and once into Lake Algonquin and the 16000YBP flood on the Missouri that evulsed into the Ohio River.  In the west, there was the catastrophic draining of Lake Bonneville (14000YBP); it took the earthen barrier 700 years to give way, but when it did...  And then there was Lake Missoula which may have filled and catastrophically drained as many as 2000 times, creating the Channeled Scablands.

The occurrence of super-floods seems to be climate-controlled.

Doug

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Flood patterns in Mediterranean basin form a dipole - western end floods while eastern end dry and vice versa.  Eastern end was in dry phase in 4100BC.  No evidence of serious flooding in Spain, France or Italy at this time.  Seasonality of flooding suggests 4100BC flood occurred in autumn or winter.  Upper Nile more under control of Indian rather than European climate.

Doug

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Found a paper examining deposits in Lake Constance resulting from large floods caused by washouts of landslide-dammed lakes.  The deposits date to 9400YBP.  There is no evidence of a catastrophic flood above them in the strat column - "Noah's Flood" did not affect Lake Constance (the Bodensee).  Will see if I can find another similar paper pertaining to the Rhine valley.

Tephra deposits near Bonn, Germany dated to 13,006+/-9 YBP are not overlain by flood deposits - "Noah's Flood" did not affect southwest Germany.  13,006YBP marks the boundary between the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age in Europe.  "Noah's Flood" occurred at the end of the New Stone Age in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

I know I'm re-inventing the wheel with all this, but if I am going to write something, I need a solid understanding of what is known.

Doug

Edited by Doug1066
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Another problem:  there are lots of strat columns, but in most cases the authors only recorded two ages - one toward the top and one toward the bottom.  Thus, if there's a flood layer, there's no date on it specifically.  To really do this project properly, we need to get good dates on a lot of flood layers.

We have a complete Holocene strat column exposed at Bear Creek north of here.  You can see it from the interstate.  It shows three wet periods, but no super-floods.

Immediately before our flood was the "4.2 event."  This was a dry period that spanned most of the globe.  It should show up in tree ring chronologies as narrow rings,  In sediment columns it woud show up as a layer of fine-grained sediments, or as an unconformity.

Doug

Edited by Doug1066
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Looks like lots of work Doug.   I hope you are having fun at it.

On 5/17/2022 at 1:41 PM, jaylemurph said:

Ah. Retreated to an audience more tolerant of BS, eh? No one to gainsay you when there's no one left talking to you.

It looks to my uneducated eye like the  a bibliography of  stratigraphic data points across the world. A different approach for a thread, but maybe I am too tolerant of BS.

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On 5/17/2022 at 3:41 PM, jaylemurph said:

Ah. Retreated to an audience more tolerant of BS, eh? No one to gainsay you when there's no one left talking to you.

--Jaylemurph

If you think I'm wrong, say what the mistake is and where I made it and back up what you say.  That way you could contribute to the project in a constructive manner instead of just making illiterate comments from the side.

Doug

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7 hours ago, Tatetopa said:

Looks like lots of work Doug.   I hope you are having fun at it.

It looks to my uneducated eye like the  a bibliography of  stratigraphic data points across the world. A different approach for a thread, but maybe I am too tolerant of BS.

It is a lot of work and I'm just getting started.  And it is fun to discover new things.

Geology will be a big part of this.  Dendrochronology will be a smaller part, as there aren't enough records that go back that far and tree rings are not real good at capturing flood records.  Archaeology will even serve to determine relative ages of strata.  AND everything has to fit with climate conditions of the time.   I'll even use the Bible's evidence that The Flood occurred at the transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age cultures.  Also, boat-building technology at the time was vastly different from modern methods.

There's a vast difference between thinking that a super-flood might be the source of the Noah's Flood story and learning that there really was such a flood and being able to determine some of its features.

And, yes, I'm going to be looking up an awful lot of strat records.

Doug

Edited by Doug1066
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Thinking that The Flood was not as bad in Mesopotamia as it was in the Nile.  There would probably have been survivors in Mesopotamia, but not necessarily so in the Nile basin.  It should have reached the Indus valley, but I can find no evidence of that.  I checked some playa lakes in Iran.  A wet period began about the time of The Flood.  It is tempting to think that The Flood was the start of it, but the strat columns don't tell.

The Mesopotamian valley probably filled with water, possibly creating a lake larger than Lake Erie.  There should be some evidence of that in strat columns near Faluja.  The slope of the rivers is almost nil.  It would have taken a long time for them to drain.

It seems that Africa is worth another look, particularly Ethiopia and the White Nile.  The process is complicated by strat cores that don't give good flood dates and by the near lack of cultural evidence to give relative dates.

Doug

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1 hour ago, Doug1066 said:

Thinking that The Flood was not as bad in Mesopotamia as it was in the Nile.  There would probably have been survivors in Mesopotamia, but not necessarily so in the Nile basin.  It should have reached the Indus valley, but I can find no evidence of that.  I checked some playa lakes in Iran.  A wet period began about the time of The Flood.  It is tempting to think that The Flood was the start of it, but the strat columns don't tell.

The Mesopotamian valley probably filled with water, possibly creating a lake larger than Lake Erie.  There should be some evidence of that in strat columns near Faluja.  The slope of the rivers is almost nil.  It would have taken a long time for them to drain.

It seems that Africa is worth another look, particularly Ethiopia and the White Nile.  The process is complicated by strat cores that don't give good flood dates and by the near lack of cultural evidence to give relative dates.

Doug

Doug, you are looking for ancient floods.

I remember I once posted about a possible explanation that sometimes intact carcasses are being found of mammoths with remants of flowers and grass still in their mouths.

During the ice-age giant lakes were formed in what's now Siberia and Altai. One of them was larger than the Caspian Sea. These lakes formed behind huge ice dams. As soon as these dams started melting at the end of the last ice age, they collapsed and lakes up to hundred meters in depth emptied causing a catastroph. Grazing mammoths would get caught by the resulting gigantic flashflood, and be carried many hundreds of miles untill their bodies settled on dry - and frozen - ground.

No doubt people got caught by the same flashfloods.

Example:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229684131_Late_Quaternary_Catastrophic_Flooding_in_the_Altai_Mountains_of_South-Central_Siberia_A_Synoptic_Overview_and_an_Introduction_to_Flood_Deposit_Sedimentology

 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-largest-Pleistocene-floods-in-Siberia-originated-in-the-Kuray-and-Chuya-basins-and_fig2_286417633

Screenshot_20220521-190523_Firefox.jpg.7649136a270221bd5a108e4fe31a116a.jpg

Edited by Abramelin
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1 hour ago, Abramelin said:

Thanks for your information.

I had a big long reply written and fell asleep at the keyboard and somehow deleted it.

I have already determined that The Flood was a Holocene phenomenon, occurring about 4100BC at the end of the Stone Age and beginning of the Bronze Age.  It was probably bigger in the Nile Valley than the Mesopotamian.  It should have occurred in the Indus Valley, too, but I have not yet found a strat column that shows it.  It did not reach Italy or the western Med.  I have not checked China or the Far East.  The Hohenheim Oak-Pine Chronology from the Rhine valley shows that there was no super-flood there.  Tree ring chronologies from Southern California show that there was no super-flood in the White Mountains.  A strat column from Bear Creek, a few miles north of here shows no flood layer; although it shows three wet periods since the Younger Dryas.

It was a real flood - the largest anywhere on earth during the Holocene.  Imagine a 10000-year flood, because that's what it was,  There were bigger ones during the Ice Age, as you have pointed out.

Figuring out the cause is going to be a challenge.  I am leaning toward a hurricane on the Indian Ocean making landfall on the Horn of Africa.  A meteor impact has been suggested, but where's the crater?  Any other ideas?

Thanks again,

Doug

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I spent the afternoon looking at strat columns and reading history of the Indus Valley.  Starting to think the reason I can't find geological or archaeological evidence of a flood in the Indus Valley is because there isn't any.  The rise and duration of the Harappan civilization is totally out of sync with a 4100BC flood.  That civilization began well before The Flood and met its end in the 4.2 event (drought).  Nothing disturbed it around the time of the 4100BC Flood.

I did note that the Ethiopian highlands is a very active center for the Indian Summer Monsoon.  A flood originating there could not reach the Indus Valley.  But on the other hand, a flood originating there could not reach Mesopotamia, either.  So it is definitely looking like there were two, not-necessarily-contemporaneous floods - one in Mesopotamia and one on the Nile.  Of the two, the Nile flood looks like the larger - it also fits the biblical description better - except for location.

Doug

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2 hours ago, Abramelin said:

That Tarim Basin looks intriguing and has about the right date - it's within the error limits for the 4100BC flood,  Was there a third flood?.  Something worth checking out.

Right now, it's looking like The Flood occurred in Egypt, and Mesopotamia was a secondary event.  I hesitate to say that the Egyptian flood is the source of the story because the Bible is too close to the Sumerian version of events.  I still need to look for evidence of ponding in the T-E Valley.

Doug

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6 hours ago, Abramelin said:

I found an article saying how this was Atlantis.

Doug

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1 hour ago, Doug1066 said:

I found an article saying how this was Atlantis.

Doug

I see a giant tree ring shaped hole in your heart. Please see this. It will only take less than two minutes, and it might change your life.

 

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18 minutes ago, Davros of Skaro said:

I see a giant tree ring shaped hole in your heart. Please see this. It will only take less than two minutes, and it might change your life.

 

Nice advice.  Doesn't really help with describing the 4100BC flood, though.

A blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus?

My hypothesis:  if t really happened, it left physical evidence behind.  If it didn't leave physical evidence, then it didn't happen.  At any rate,it didn't happen like the Bible told it.

Doug

P.S.:  I am already this close to being an atheist.  Don't push it.

Doug

Edited by Doug1066
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7 hours ago, Abramelin said:

I looked up Tarim Basin.  The lake (actually several small salt lakes) are called Lop Nor.  The lake is shown on ancient Chinese maps, but beyond that, I haven't found anything (Looks like I'll have to read the book.).  They were of mid-level salinity in 2344BC.  That means they had been diluted by an in-flow of water from their previous hyper-saline state, but it is impossible to say whether that in-flow was rapid or slow.  They have gradually dried out to their present hyper-saline condition.  Idea:  if there was a large lake there, it should have had some sort of natural dam at its outlet.  Maybe I can find evidence of it.

Doug

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Having trouble finding flood evidence in the TE strat column.  There's some there, but not nearly as much as you'd think given the size of the flood that came down the Nile.  Only three out of over a hundred excavated ruins show flooding evidence.  There's a series of bore holes taken across the open plain that show some, but not as much as you'd think.  Could it be that the villages were built on mounds (jeziras) and The Flood simply went around most of them?  That would not be a super-flood, but rather an average, garden-variety flood.

Doug

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