The worldwide flood: more than a myth?
Due to the recent advent of underwater archaeology, along with the advances in both aerial and space photography, evidence for the existence of a worldwide flood in our distant past is slowly coming to the fore. It is the accumulation of such evidence which could prove the flood myths which permeate every culture across the globe to be more than just stories.
One piece of evidence has been highlighted by author Michael Jaye who took full advantage of modern technology and discovered submerged ancient river systems using Google Earth as a tool and succeeded in bringing to light the existence of submarine canyons and former river tributary systems in the deep sea, whose existence ‘remains essentially beyond our understanding’[i].
Such meandering channels (above) could only have been formed when they were above sea level and using new map data, Jaye revealed in his book The Worldwide Flood that these submerged rivers which are undeniable in their structure are now lying beneath more than two miles of water below the sea.
‘The new maps unequivocally reveal well-preserved drainages under more than two miles of water, and they are ubiquitous. Their existence implies that there must have been a worldwide flood,’ claims Jaye.
‘The new data should evoke new thinking, which in our case would result in the restoration of the belief that the Earth suffered a devastating flood. That geologists have failed to review their fundamental belief in the presence of this new data is yet another powerful testament to the constraining effect that ‘no flood, ever’ holds over science, related disciplines, and rational thought.’[ii]
The inundation of such an immense volume of water could only have been caused by a cosmic source according to Jaye, ‘A cosmic impact nearly 13,000 years ago before present, introduced more than 3 km of water to the earth’s ocean basins and ecosystem. By causing the submersion of vast formerly exposed landscapes, by displacing the atmosphere, and by inducing what we call the Younger Dryas ecosystem changes, the worldwide flood forever changed the planet. The impact ushered in a new geologic era, the Post-Diluvian.’[iii]
THE YOUNGER DRYAS CLIMATE EVENT
What cosmic impact was Jaye referring to exactly? A group of scientists now hypothesise that multiple fragments of a large comet collided with the earth during the Younger Dryas, a geological period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
The period has always been considered mysterious because when it first began 12,800 years ago, the earth had spent approximately 10,000 years emerging from the Ice Age with steadily rising temperatures worldwide as the ice caps slowly melted, before taking a sudden and previously unexplained dramatic return to colder conditions, reaching similar freezing temperatures as those at the peak of the Ice Age 21,000 years ago. It is thought the ensuing floods and tidal waves threw up vast clouds of dust into the upper atmosphere which enshrouded the earth, preventing sunlight from reaching the surface which in turn initiated the sudden global deep freeze at the onset of the Younger Dryas.
Lasting 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, the deep freeze rapidly began to heat up once more until the rising global temperatures were hot enough to melt the remaining ice caps in such a short space of time that sea levels rose massively due to the influx of fresh water being dumped into the oceans, ultimately cooling the seas to such an extent that the Gulf Stream and other essential ocean currents became ineffectual.
The cataclysm responsible for the massive temperature fluctuations, immense floods and vast wildfires was not a single event but an epoch with two pronounced nodes of disaster. The first stage which occurred at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago marked the start of a humungous flood followed by extreme global cooling. Then, 11,600 years ago, another cataclysmic flood occurred which was to be accompanied by abrupt, extreme global warming.
This second period of flooding which occurred around 9,600 BC could also be connected to the intense precipitation which left its geological footprint on the Sphinx enclosure at the Giza Plateau, if Robert Schoch’s theories are correct (below).
The episodes of immense global flooding at both ends of the Younger Dryas are referred to as Meltwater Pulse A and 1B, and are the result of remnant ice caps in North America and northern Europe which collapsed simultaneously amidst worldwide global warming.
The sudden flooding of the world’s oceans is captured with this data which also correlates with the Greenland ice core data that shows spikes in temperature at precisely the same periods. Cesare Emiliani, a Professor from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami discovered hard evidence of cataclysmic global flooding ‘between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago’ whilst examining isotopic analysis of deep-sea sediments. But what exactly caused such upheavals?
In order to answer that question the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) is a theory proposed by the Comet Research Group, part of a non-profit, charitable corporation collaborating with 63 scientists from 55 universities in 16 countries. The group set out to scientifically assess the effects of comet impacts on human history and to educate the public around the world of their findings, with the ultimate goal of providing enough data which could protect us from possible future comet impacts on Earth.
The YDIH suggests that the impact from a fragmented comet ‘instantaneously melted millions of square miles of ice which caused the global deluge that is commemorated in myths across the globe,’[iv] but as the impact hit the North American icecap in Canada, no crater depression was left on the earth’s surface.
How do we know the comet hit Canada if no impact crater has been found? An article in the New Scientist explains, ‘Levels of the extraterrestrial debris, for example, are highest at the Gainey archaeological site in Michigan, just beyond the southern reach of North America’s primary ice sheet 12,900 years ago. Moreover, levels decrease the further you go from Gainey, suggesting that the comet blew up largely over Canada.’
More proof of this cataclysmic event comes from a variety of sources, all coinciding with various other events which have confounded academics for decades. It is during the Younger Dryas climate event that we find the mysterious extinction of mammoths and megafauna (below). Also the Clovis culture of North America vanished completely from the archaeological record during the Younger Dryas period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
Above: Thousands of scattered mammoth bones at the ‘mammoth cemetery’ in Berelekh, Northern Siberia. Two radiocarbon dates place the occupation of the site at around 11,500 BC.
Evidence of the rapidity of the sudden global warming at the end of the Younger Dryas comes from Greenland ice core data, sediment core data and moon data, which all indicate that the 9700 BC warming was instantaneous; “At 9700 BC we have incredible climatic change going from deep Ice Age to modern warming, and this literally, now based on what they call micro-stratigraphy from Greenland ice cores, can be dated within . . . weeks to days, so this happened, we are talking virtually overnight.”[v]
Proof of a gigantic cometary impact over northern Canada roughly 12,800 years ago is indicated by the discovery of around 10 million tons of microspherules, carbon spherules, glass-like carbon (containing nanodiamonds and fullerenes) which were deposited across nearly 50 million square kilometres over North, Central and South America, a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean, North Africa and the Middle East, and most of Europe. Seen only through microscopes, all of these molecules which act as impact markers, reveal characteristics which are inconsistent with any known meteorites, suggesting that the impact was made by a previously unobserved, possibly extrasolar body (from outside of the solar system).
‘A cosmic impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling episode is the only hypothesis capable of explaining the simultaneous deposition of peak abundances in nanodiamonds, magnetic and glassy spherules, melt-glass, platinum and/or other proxies across at least four continents (approaching 50 million square kilometres). The evidence strongly supports a cosmic impact 12,800 years ago.’[vi]
The YDIH states that a comet which originated in the Oort Cloud – ‘an extended shell of icy objects that exist in the outermost reaches of the solar system’[vii] that contains trillions of comets – arrived in our solar system around 20,000 years ago before going into an orbit which crosses the Earth’s orbit twice a year. Earth passes through the 30 million km wide orbit called the Taurid Meteor Stream, once in June/early July and once in November, taking twelve days to pass through on each occasion. According to the YDIH, data suggests that it was the fragments of a cataclysmic comet 62 miles in diameter which struck the Laurentide Ice Sheet in Canada, an absolute colossus compared with the 6 mile wide comet that decimated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The most recent impact from a meteorite in the Taurid Meteor Stream hit Tunguska in Siberia at the end of June in 1908. That particular object was only 100 metres in diameter which actually exploded in the sky about 5 km above the ground, but still managed to flatten 80 million trees across 2,000 sq. km, an area the size of London.
The proposed cosmic impact was immediately followed by the appearance of a carbon-rich black layer caused by nationwide wild fires at many sites across the Unites States including 15 Carolina Bays (elliptical impact crater depressions along the Atlantic coast), with the in situ bones of extinct megafauna and Clovis tools being discovered beneath the back layer, not above or within it.
To this day, scientists have only discovered two layers of sediment which are broadly distributed across many continents; one layer was found 12,800 years, and the other was at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago where a gigantic meteorite impacted the Gulf of Mexico and sent the dinosaurs and most of the earth’s living things into oblivion.
‘The concentration of impact markers peaks near the Great Lakes and their unusually high water content suggests that a 4.6 km-wide comet fragmented and exploded over the Laurentide Ice Sheet creating numerous craters that now persist at the bottom of the Great Lakes. The coincidence of this impact, the onset of Younger Dryas cooling, extinction of the megafauna, and the appearance of a black mat strongly suggests that all these events are directly related.’[viii]
The data led the scientists of the Comet Research Group to the conclusion that ‘the YD event resulted from multiple ET airbursts along with surface impacts. We further suggest that the catastrophic effects of this ET event and associated biomass burning led to abrupt YD cooling, contributed to the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, promoted human cultural changes, and led to immediate decline in some post-Clovis human populations. The evidence is more consistent with an impactor that was carbon-rich, nickel–iron-poor, and therefore, most likely a comet.’[ix]
Above: Giant ripple marks deposited by the Ice Age floods at the Camas Prairie, Washington.
PHYSICAL PROOF
More fingerprints of the worldwide flooding during the Younger Dryas can be witnessed at the remarkable area of the Channelled Scablands in Washington State. The scabs which gave the area its name are huge clumps of rock which litter the landscape where the torrents of glacial melt water eroded away the different rock types, leaving the harder stone in raised scab-like formations whilst washing away the softer stone entirely.
Scattered over ‘Boulder Park’, Washington State, we find glacial erratics, some weighing in excess of 10,000 tons, whilst at Camas Prairie, we find giant current ripple marks, some more than fifty feet high, which cover the plains of what was once the bottom of Lake Missoula.
Above: The ancient Dry Falls cataract in Washington was created 12,800 years ago during a fortnight of immense flooding.
The extinct cataract (horseshoe shaped waterfall) of Dry Falls in Grant County, Washington is an ancient fossilised waterfall dating back 12,800 years which dwarfs Niagara Falls in size being 2.5 times higher. It once carried several thousand times more water than Niagara Falls, whose discharge of water falling over its ledge reaches a maximum of roughly 200,000 cubic feet per second. In comparison, during the global flood of 12,800 years ago the 400 ft. high precipice of the Upper Grand Coulee at Dry Falls reached a discharge of somewhere between 3 and 400 million cubic feet per second or in other words, “somewhere between 10 and 20 times the combined flow of every river on Earth flowing all at once.”[x]
Quite incredibly, the immense cataract at Dry Falls formed during less than two weeks of flooding compared to Niagara which is the result of 12,000 or more years of fast flowing river water. The information on this ancient terrain really brings into focus the sheer magnitude of the worldwide flood, and one really needs to see the images to get any idea of the scale of this event.
The common consensus from geologists regarding the Scablands and all of its features (which include the cataracts, coulees, dry flood channels, erratic fields and ripple plains) is that they came about as a result of a few thousand years of gradually melting ice sheets which slowly eroded away the landscape and left its indelible footprint over vast areas of the region. The reason for insisting upon such a long timeframe has always been down to the fact that nobody had ever presented a reasonable hypothesis on what could be capable of heating up the glaciers quick enough to release the meltwaters suddenly within a matter of weeks. But more recent studies from the Comet Research Group have finally found the smoking gun in the form of a cosmic impact large enough and hot enough to have caused such a cataclysmic meltdown.
Graham Hancock explained the details in an interview: ‘There were two significant episodes of impacts from fragments of a single giant comet, which broke up into multiple fragments. The first set of impact was 12,800 years ago, and the second set of impact of 11,600 years ago. The second set of impacts, in particular, was associated with very large scale, rapid sea level rise, which in a sense, in a very real sense, was a global flood. All of the world's oceans are interlinked. You can't dump millions of square miles of ice water into any single ocean without affecting the level of all the world’s oceans, and we know that at the end of the last ice age – and 11,600 years ago really is taken as the end of the last Ice Age – we know that sea levels rose 400 feet. 10 million square miles of land, roughly the equivalent in size to Europe and China added together was submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. These are facts, and it sounds like a global flood to me.’[xi]
The information offered in this post is just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg which highlights the likelihood that the worldwide flood spoken of in global myths over the last few millennia may be more than just stories and could prove to have been the destructive force responsible for decimating a once thriving civilisation which has since been forgotten.
This article was taken from The Myth Of Man by JP Robinson.
For full references please use source link below