Was there really a Great Flood: Scientists put forward an unexpected version

The Great Flood is one of the most famous stories in the Bible. According to the Old Testament, righteous Noah was commanded by God to build an ark and place on it two individuals of each species of earthly biodiversity. Then an unprecedented flood came upon the planet, which lasted for 40 days. Even the highest mountains were covered with water.

The story of the global flood is found not only in the Bible. In the ancient Hindu Puranas, Sumerian myths and the "Epic of Gilgamesh" also mentioned the legend of the destruction of mankind as a result of catastrophic floods. Live science published a study by scientists on the likelihood of a massive natural cataclysm.

If it rained for 40 days

David Montgomery, professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle, confidently asserts that there was no flood. He explains his theory plainly and simply: "there simply would not have been enough water on Earth for a flood of this magnitude.

"If the 'heavens' had opened up and all the water in the atmosphere shifted to Earth in the form of a long continuous and very heavy rain, the planet would have been submerged in water only about 2.5 centimeters deep," the scientists sounded off the US Geological Survey. For such a small flood, arks would certainly not have been needed.

If all the glaciers had melted

Consider another option. It has been raining for 40 days and on top of that - all the ice sheets, all the icebergs and glaciers have melted. NASA researchers say that in such a case, the level of the World Ocean would rise by 60 meters.

In addition, scientists have calculated that 22.6 million cubic kilometers of underground water are stored in the upper part of the Earth's crust, which could cover the planet for another 180 meters.

It seems that a flood is possible - there is a lot of water. But scientists reassure: this is definitely not the scale described in the Bible. The highest mountain above sea level reaches 8,849 meters, and geologists examining the rocks have found no evidence that there was ever really a large-scale flood on Earth.

Versions about the Great Flood

Historians argue that the Flood and the legend of Noah's Ark are simply retellings of other stories that existed in ancient cultures and mythologies. Professor of ancient studies Ira Spahr emphasized that it is estimated that the biblical stories in the Old Testament, which were recorded between 800 B.C. and 500 B.C., come from older beliefs and oral histories. For example, the Sumerians described the Flood 3,000 years before Christ. Of course, these were not the words of eyewitnesses, but the legends of even older legends.

Professor Montgomery added that there were probably localized floods on a large scale many millennia ago that inspired the stories of the Flood. For example, in the late 1990s the hypothesis circulated that the so-called World Flood had once occurred near the Black Sea. Oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman voiced the theory that about 7500 years ago the Mediterranean Sea began to flow into the then isolated Black Sea. This caused massive floods, which could be a prototype of the events of the Bible.

The OBOZREVATEL has previously published scientists' hypotheses about where the Biblical Eve was buried and what is known about the tomb of the foremother of mankind.

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