Noah's Flood circa 6000 BCE

One outcome of yesterday’s posting on the Laurentide collapse is that it becomes feasible to address the historicity of the legend of Noah. Eight thousand years or circa 6000 BCE is short enough to allow successful oral transmission of major events in human history. These types of oral transmissions are extremely valuable as a conforming data point often leading to much harder data. Many such tales have driven much real discovery. Who would even look for massive flood evidence in the first place without inspiration from Noah? That such evidence turned out to be confounding more often than not does not take away from the hard evidence gathered.

The abrupt release of water and the resultant rise of the sea level was very quick. The rise is estimated to be 45 feet. That is a bit too precise. It could just as easily been twice as large. It was also followed by a slower and steady rise as the balance of the ice melted out. The main event certainly played out in weeks, however.

It certainly explains one anomalous feature of the legend rather nicely. Noah built a boat; it floated for forty days and then was grounded. A rising sea that was slowly driving inland on a plain or delta would most likely give this experience. This is not true for a normal river flood.

Maybe Noah was the local mathematician - scholar who got word that the great ice dam was ready to break and did the basic calculations and acted on them.

It also explains the global distribution of this flood motif. Everybody was affected who had access to a coast. This is another important point. The majority of the global population has always been concentrated on the coast and often exploiting the sea itself. Remember the Pacific Northwest were huge Stone Age populations built up based on seafood. The inland was difficult and only modestly used and could never support any real population even today. Nice to look at though.

We also know that prior to the climate stabilizing, that the temperate interior was only suitable for small hunter gatherer bands with an attendant low population. They would have penetrated every valley on Earth but they lived a circumscribed life way. At best, they had begun cattle husbandry which really lends itself to that type of small band society.

Another direct result of a rapid rise of the sea would be the actual destruction of a large portion of the coastal population, if only through a loss of their livelihoods. Shell beds would be lost for a generation and this was a major staple as the fisheries were very seasonal. This means that the repopulation of the coasts would have come from the inland and highland populations conforming to the archeological and other evidence.

We could now run amok and make all sorts of other suggestions. However a real global coastal flood confirms the one salient global fact. There was a global flood. There were also eye witnesses who were seriously impressed. We now know when it happened. The rest of the legend can be safely dismissed as embroidery. Great story though.

Some of this embroidery could also be material folded in from unrelated events such as forty days of rain. That is not impossible by itself in the aftermath of a volcano perhaps. The tale of the dove is so clearly part and parcel of the religious symbolic tool kit as need no further comment.

During the four to six thousand years that it took to melt the northern Ice Cap, the sea was always persistently rising by on average about half an inch per year. This is barely faster than geological motion and totally unnoticeable. Thus the only event that could ever have been noticed was the release of Lake Agassiz into the Atlantic Ocean. It is right to call it Noah’s Flood.

Laurentide Collapse

I am posting this news story because it establishes a couple of dates rather more closely than previously. I think readers could read my postings back in July of last year to understand my ideas on the Pleistocene nonconformity. This has also been published in Viewzone (Google it).

The reduction of the Laurentide ice sheet was the final act in the total collapse of the Northern Ice Cap. The first act was the swift collapse of the Scandinavian sheet. What this makes very clear is that the final collapse was an escapement of a huge amount of pent up lake water a mere 8200 years ago.

The drop in global temperatures may have lasted a couple of hundred years, but the reduction of the balance of the ice would be then steady and uneventful. This means that the global climate finally stabilized only 7800 years ago. This all coincides with the rise of agricultural man in the Northern Hemisphere. Mind you conditions had been improving during the previous 5000 years as the climate regime of the Holocene established itself.

This also means that the sea would have swiftly risen a total of 45 feet, almost certainly driving out coastal populations from fertile deltas in particular. This is keeping in mind that the loss of the Northern Ice Cap over the past 5,000 years had driven all populations off the continental shelf itself. We know that the total rise in sea levels was around 300 feet.

I find this late date for the collapse of the Laurentide to be intriguing. The actual climate became warm through to about 3,000 years ago ending with the demise of the Bronze Age.

In any event the apparent settling of the temperate zones appears to have happened hot on the heels of any climatic improvement. It is as if we were ready and waiting to go. Cattle culture in particular was established in England as early as 9,000 years ago. Obviously the Gulf Stream was hard at work.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how utterly recent the rise of man in the temperate climes is. In the meantime, the possible antiquity of man in the tropics is not even been truly investigated if it can be. Did some form of agricultural man arise, say thirty thousand years ago? The sea has covered the traces of maritime man in those same waters.

How it happened: The catastrophic flood that cooled the Earth

PARIS (AFP) — Canadian geologists say they can shed light on how a vast lake, trapped under the ice sheet that once smothered much of North America, drained into the sea, an event that cooled Earth's climate for hundreds of years.

During the last ice age, the Laurentide Ice Sheet once covered most of Canada and parts of the northern United States with a frozen crust that in some places was three kilometres (two miles) thick.

As the temperature gradually rose some 10,000 years ago, the ice receded, gouging out the hollows that would be called the Great Lakes.

Beneath the ice's thinning surface, an extraordinary mass of water built up -- the glacial lake Agassiz-Ojibway, a body so vast that it covered parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Ontario and Minnesota.

And then, around 8,200 years ago, Agassiz-Ojibway massively drained, sending a flow of water into the Hudson Strait and into the Labrador Sea that was 15 times greater than the present discharge of the Amazon River.

By some estimates, sea levels rose 14 metres (45 feet) as a result.

How the great flood was unleashed has been a matter of debate.

Some experts suggest an ice dam was smashed down, or the gushing water spewed out over the top of the icy lid.

Quebec researchers Patrick Lajeunesse and Guillaume Saint-Onge believe, though, that the outburst happened under the ice sheet, rather than above it or through it.

In a study appearing on Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, the pair describe how they criss-crossed Hudson Bay on a research vessel, using sonar to scan more than 10,500 kilometres (6,000 miles) to get a picture of the bay floor.

In the south of the bay, they found lines of deep waves in the sandy bed, stretching more than 900 kilometres (562 miles) in length and some 1.7 metres (5.5 feet) deep.

These are signs that the bay's floor, protected by the mighty lid of ice, was swept by a mighty current many years ago but has been still ever since, they say.

In the west of the bay, they found curious marks in the shape of parabolas twisting around to the northeast.

The arcs were chiselled as much as three metres (10 feet) into the sea bed and found at depths of between 80 and 205 metres (260 and 666 feet).

The duo believe that this part of the bay had icebergs that were swept by the massive current.

The bergs' jagged tips were trapped in the sea bed and acted like a pivot. As the icebergs swung around, other protruding tips ripped arc-like tracks on the bay floor.

Also presented as evidence are deep submarine channels and deposits of red sediment that stretch from land west of Hudson Bay right across the northwestern floor of the bay itself -- both point to a current that swept all before it.

"Laurentide ice was lifted buoyantly, enabling the flood to traverse southern Hudson Bay under the ice sheet," the study suggests.

Previous work suggests the flood was so huge that it affected climate around the world.

The influx of freshwater into the North Atlantic reduced ocean salinity so much that this braked the transport of heat flowing from the tropics to temperate regions.

Temperatures dropped by more than three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in Western Europe for 200-400 years -- a mini-Ice Age in itself.