Was Their Flood But a Trickle?

"Damn you, science. Can't we even keep our big mythical flood?" (shakes fist at lab coat on peg).

Or so seem to say creationists around the world, especially when the world produces research which flatly contradicts their view of history, geology, and life on earth.

One of the tenets claimed by so-called "young earth" creationists (or YECs) is bible literalism. That is to say, they claim that not only is everything in the bible literally true, but that it provides irrefutable scientific evidence of the creation of the world, and of its subsequent destruction by the Noachian flood, and of anything else that you could ever need to know in a science-y way. Building on the pioneeringly wrong-headed timetable constructed by the 17th century Bishop James Ussher, who determined that, based on biblical chronology, the earth was created at 9PM on the evening of 22 October 4004 BCE, which would have made it... a brisk autumn evening?

On the one hand, sitting down with the bible on one hand and a Big Chief tablet on the other is a pretty impressive feat, when you consider that no one had ever done so before (or, had they done so, they wisely binned the resulting calcuation). Comedic as it sounds, Ussher (called Primate of All Ireland, which just makes me laugh and I'm not really sorry about it) took a tool at his disposal and used it to try to find out how old the world was. Unfortunately, this leads YECs to claim that the world, everything in it, and the surrounding universe are less than ten thousand years old, having rather failed to grasp the concept of "moving with the times". They also maintain, unlike their close ideological brethren in the "intelligent design" camp, that the geologic record - that is, the history of the planet as recorded in the layers of rock around the planet - supports their view without ambiguity.

Usually, the "evidence" of this support is either a wild misinterpretation of available data, or a willful mis-reading of said same data, or a refutation of established parameters and constants in the universe (they simply adore, for example, claiming that the known constant of the speed of light has actually been actively changed by an interventionist deity, apparently with time on its hands); sometimes, they indulge in these three and others in various delightfully mendacious combinations. Radioactive decay? Magic man has changed the known decay rates. Rates of sedimentation? Er...

Yes. The rates of sedimentation, and the resulting fossilisation of a thousand million creatures: that's all down to the flood as well, if you're a YEC.

Unfortunately, in attempting to use their partially-grasped view of science, YECs have made some claims about evidence of past flooding. Specifically, they have said that this Great Flood would have left traces right around the world, making the bible story literally provable and true. From seashells on the tops of the Swiss Alps to the sedimentary layers which led James Hutton to pen the revolutionary, if fabulously unreadable Theory of the Earth, your common or garden YEC has a one-stop shop for answers, and no need to worry about any other pesky "evidence", "data", or "fact". As Robin Ince says, "magic man done it!"

However, the research from the Black Sea, which is considered a candidate source for some of the flood myths, quite possibly including the Noachian one, and as reported at insciences.org, tells a different story. Instead of finding traces of a massive, region-drowing flood, as flood geology-keen YEC types would suggest, the team from the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institute have done something novel and looked at the data. And, in short, they suggest that the basin was not as profoundly flooded as original studies, congruent with the Noachian fable, suggested.

In the late 1990s, Columbia University researchers Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman examined the geological evidence and estimated the Black Sea level at the time of the flood was approximately 80 meters lower than present day levels. They suggested that the impact of a Black Sea flood could have forced the movement of early agriculturist groups to central Europe and established the story of Noah and his ark, as well as flood myths among other peoples.

Flood stories are common in the mythologies of nearly all peoples, not the least of which include the mythologies of the various desert wanderers. The Babylonians had one. The Greeks had one. In fact, here's a huge list of them, courtesy of TalkOrigins. They are, to paraphrase the very orange David Dickinson, "cheap as chips and twice as common".

To extend their record back in time beyond 6000 years, in 2007, Giosan and his colleagues drilled a new core to 42 meters depth at the mouth of the Danube River, the largest river emptying into the Black Sea. Their goal was to reconstruct the history of that part of the delta—before and after the flood—through an examination of the sediments. In analyzing the delta sediment from the new core as well as others taken in the region, Giosan’s team discovered fresh water deposits of the newly forming delta dating back approximately 10,000 years, subsequently overlaid by fine marine sediments, followed by the modern delta deposits.

And you can guess the result:

“We don’t see evidence for a catastrophic flood as others have described,” said Liviu Giosan, a geologist in the WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department.

The practical upshot of all of this? As with most science, it is progressive, rather than immediately conclusive. More data can lead to new and better conclusions. But at this moment in time, it looks as though - once again, and certainly not for the last time - the YECs have suffered another blow.