NOAH"S FLOOD MAY HAVE BEEN A MEGATSUNAMI

Believe? I'm not qualified to attempt to unpick it. I am aware that it's not widely believed nowadays, but it's a helluva body of research for one man nevertheless. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la science.
Entertaining, though.

Carl Sagan told an interesting anecdote about meeting an expert in ancient literature at a university staff party. Sagan, of course, knew that the "astronomy" and "astrophysics" in Velikovsky's work was utter tripe, but had been impressed by his command of ancient literature. Sagan recounts that the ancient literature maven told him that, of course, Velikovsky's references to ancient literature were utter tripe, but that he had been impressed by his knowledge of astronomy.

Theres very little actual "research" involved in Vellikovsky. Like stories of the NAzca Lines, Vellikovsky started with a premise and selectively presented information that seemed to support it. On his trip to the publishers, he made up quite a tall tale or two for which no evidence has ever existed.
As Gould said of him "Vellikovsky wasnt a charlatan, he was just completely and gloriously wrong. He would reconstruct celestial mechanics in order to preserve the literal occurences of myths"

Looking up Wiipedia, there's quite a lot there, including

"The Velikovsky Affair"
Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters (particularly the original campaign led by Harlow Shapley), that some commentators have made an analysis of the conflict itself. The most prominent of these was a study by American Behavioral Scientist magazine, eventually published in book form as The Velikovsky Affair.[34] This framed the discussion in terms of how academic disciplines reacted to ideas from workers from outside their field, claiming that there was an academic aversion to permitting people to cross inter-disciplinary boundaries. More recently, James Gilbert, professor of history at University of Maryland, challenged this traditional version with a more nuanced account focused on the intellectual rivalry between Harlow Shapley and Horace Kallen, Velikovsky's ally.[35] Earlier, Henry Bauer challenged the traditional view that the Velikovsky Affair illustrated the resistance of scientists to new ideas by pointing out "the nature and validity of Velikovsky's claims must be considered before one decides that the Affair can illuminate the reception of new ideas in science...."[36]

The scientific press generally denied Velikovsky a forum to rebut his critics. Velikovsky claimed that this made him a "suppressed genius", and he likened himself to Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for preaching heliocentrism.[37][38][39]

The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the catastrophist movement in the second half of the 20th century; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair.[40]

Setanta wrote-



I was once impressed by a person's knowledge of astronomy.

She said that she saw stars. On a regular basis.

The funny thing is is that everything else she said was utter tripe.

spendi, Please tell us more about this woman who saw stars, and let us make up our own minds about "utter tripe." We may arrive at a different conclusion than yours.

No you won't c.i.

Everything else she said was utter tripe. Especially if it began with the word "why".

No question about it.

Maybe you're a more commanding person that I am.

Re: NOAH"S FLOOD MAY HAVE BEEN A MEGATSUNAMI

That's very interesting, but it doesn't explain all the animals marching two by two.

It could, at a stretch, explain the two by two allowing for a bit of poetic licence and other observations but I agree that the marching is a bit far fetched.

Well, there may have been a band of jays playing some old favorites . This would automatically result in animals choosing their partners. Very naturalistic really. However, these things always lead to a second level of questions, like,

Where oh, where did the jay band get its instruments?

We're also lacking an explanation of how the Ark ended up in Roswell, N.M.

Roswell, you say? Well, that's easy. Aliens did it.

*twitches at the mention of "genetic memory"*

I do like that word "enculturate", though, that's a keeper .

I don't think you have to reach for an actual literal basis for these myths and such - the extrapolation from small things to big things seems pretty common in folklore. For example, small floods are pretty good at killing people, regardless of swimming ability. Water as a massive cleanser and messenger of death has a rather perverse poetry to it when applied to desert nomads, too . Also, like others have said, a flood as a tool of cosmic genocide is not universal.

For another example where I just invent things, we could look at the giant lizard folklore, dragons, etc. Should we extrapolate from this the idea that there were once massive lizards throughout the world such that the stories were passed down, but they just couldn't fly? Should we postulate that people found dinosaur fossils? Or are men's imaginations wild enough as it is without needing a significant basis in reality?

I vote for that... along with little dashes of reality, just to get the storytellers started... "you should have seen the fish that got away, it was thiiiiiiiisssssss BIG".

I'm not saying there wasn't a big flood somewhere. But there didn't need to be. Even a seasonal flood can lead to a whopper of a story if someone's family gets washed away.

Didn't Paul Bunyan leave mile long footprints in Canada somewhere?

It isnt so much , the myth thats being "supported". Its a presentation of some new evidence that associates a mega-tsunami with a Holocene bolide strike. The evidence , if it stands up to verification, shows that the earth isnt a meteoric " backwater" as was postulated by some at the USGS.
The recent models of flooding and desertification have included the Pitman and Ryan work of the early 90's wherein they discovered the Black Sea had been the center of some massive regional Holocene flooding .
Also Morris, had shown that the original Med basin was a post Miocene "salt pan" due to capture of planetary water by earlier continental glaciation.

Now, these new findings add one more source of historical flooding in the Indian Ocean and Eastern Med.
My addition of the "flood myth" was an attempt to connect the basis for a legend to an actual event.

Most mysths have some basis in fact, as I mentioned Scylla and Charibdis. These were dangerous straits where ships could founder by rapis changes in current velocity and direction. Ships would get smacked against the rocks and the myth just grew.

The Bible contains the "Behemoth" reference that Creastionists love to state that "this is indeed proof that dicosaurs must have lived among humans"

Giant sloths and glyptodontd were, in certain areas of the world, still alive into the late Pleistocene and could have , perhaps base founded the legend of a behemoth that was transcribed 4000 years later.


Why cringe at "genetic memory"? if a reflex thats somatically preserved can pereservere through generations of genomes, why not incidents?
Our fear of certain animals is often linked to a form of genetic memory by ethologists.

How bout calling them "Non morphological atavisms"? :wink:

It would be interesting to see if they can date core samples at these impact sites and see homogeneity across a large range of samples in the significant impact zone. But even better correlation would be to take core samples at the poles and see the same trace elements (or unusual patterns of minerals being deposited) in the same time period.

Polar ice is a good forensic tool for understanding global weather and planetary events. A collision of that proportion would have left traces in the air and water for a few years, and the polar ice would be expected to catch some of this. So its presence or absence will be compelling correlating evidence!

Antarctica would be the place to look for that.

(EDIT: Would it not? As i think about it, i wonder if Antarctica was under a sheet of ice at that time. Anybody got the answer?)

megatsunami film
Early in June, I watched the History TV Channel's presentation of a film about the Italian research team's efforts to prove the megatsunami occurred. It will be replayed on June 22nd. They posit that a landslide from Mount Etna slid into the Mediterranean, causing the tsunami. ---BBB

http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=295856

In 6,000 B.C., 8,000 years before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, waves taller than the Statue of Liberty ravaged the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, devastating ancient villages and killing untold numbers. Watch as a team of scientist's piece together evidence of this mega storm and reveal the face of this ancient tsunami for the first time. 3-D computer generated animation recreates the massive waves that may have changed the course of history.

the sediments have been dated by a number of means including radioactive hafnium within the melted glasslike **** that forms when a meteorite hits. These little melt droplets are called tektites and they form a "strewn field" about the impact area.
A new trick for dating of the age of a tsunami is the oriented dune formations that lie atop older sediments.

Antarctica and Greenland are two important isotopic source areas for dating ice cores. Many times the dusts and acidic components of big volcanoes get incorporated into these ice layers and can be dated along with the oxygen and nitrogen isotopes.

It keeps many labs busy during the slow seasons

Na I leaned about this once. What it really is is that the Babylonians... or the Jews... or someone... hey cut me some slack here, anyway they feared the sea... or something... and their temple got destroyed by the Romans... or was it the Persians... anyway that's a metaphor that event - the most terrible thing possible happened, and they turned that into a story, changing the terrible thing to the thing they feared most, being water.