Bob Ballard Set to Find Noah's Ark

[CaptJodan]

A flood of evidence?

Robert Ballard, one of the world's most famous underwater explorers, has set his sights on proving the existence of one of the Bible's most well known stories.

In an interview with ABC's Christiane Amanpour the archaeologist who discovered the Titanic discussed his findings from his search in Turkey for evidence of a civilization swept away by a monstrous ancient flood.

"We went in there to look for the flood," Ballard said. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... The land that went under stayed under."

Many have claimed to have discovered evidence of Noah's Ark, the huge ship that Noah filled with two of each creature to repopulate the planet following God's devastating flood. But in the 1990s, geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman gathered compelling evidence that showed a flood--if not an ark--may have occurred in the Middle East region about 7,500 years ago, PBS reports.

The theory, the Guardian reports, is that a rising Mediterranean Sea pushed a channel through what is now the Bosphorus, submerging the original shoreline of the Black Sea in a deluge flowing at about 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls and extending out for 100,000 square miles.

Ballard has been exploring this theory for more than a decade, National Geographic reports, first discovering evidence of a submerged ancient shoreline in 1999. At that point, Ballard was still not convinced this was a biblical flood, according to the Guardian. Last year, his team found a vessel and one of its crew members in the Black Sea, according to ABC.

Ballard is using advanced robotic technology to travel back nearly 12,000 years to a time when much of the Earth was covered in ice, ABC reports. If and when this ice started to melt, massive floods may have surged through parts of the globe, wreaking havoc on anything and anyone in its way.

With an impressive track record (besides the Titanic, Ballard also found the wreck of the battleship, Bismarck, and a U.S. fleet lost off Guadalcanal in the Pacific) and plenty of confidence, Ballard remains unfazed by critics. He plans on returning to Turkey next summer.

The story of Noah and his ark is a building block of Genesis, in the Old Testament. It is similar in some respects to the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, according to National Geographic, and the ancient Greeks, Romans and Native Americans all have their own variations on legendary flood stories.

For those archeology minded, thoughts?

[Thanas]

Typical HuffPO BS, putting a real scientifical expedition into a religious context.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Just out of curiosity, does anybody have an idea of how respected Ballard is within academic archaeologist circles? I've always had the impression that he was more of a public face/financier as opposed to a serious archaeologist, though I have absolutely nothing to back this up. He certainly has some impressive finds, but does he actually have any scholarly output? The only publications I've seen by him are pretty soft pop stuff ("Look at how cool this sunken ship looks!!!!").

That said, I could be way off.

[Guardsman Bass]

Exploring whether there were people living in the pre-flooded parts of the Black Sea region is interesting in its own right, HuffPo weirdness aside.

I've never bought the theory that this was supposedly the origin for the various "flood" stories in the region. It seems more likely to me that they emerged from the fact that people living in river valleys would occasionally get hit by rain-caused flooding.

[Thanas]

Just out of curiosity, does anybody have an idea of how respected Ballard is within academic archaeologist circles? I've always had the impression that he was more of a public face/financier as opposed to a serious archaeologist, though I have absolutely nothing to back this up. He certainly has some impressive finds, but does he actually have any scholarly output? The only publications I've seen by him are pretty soft pop stuff ("Look at how cool this sunken ship looks!!!!").

That said, I could be way off.

That may be because nautical archeology is not really accessible to the public, due to not many people caring for it outside of high-profile cases like the titanic. Which is a blessing, really, considering it leaves most of the interesting cases far out of harms way. Tourism is pretty toxic to historical research and archeology. Which leaves most interesting finds (of which many are much more interesting than, say, the titanic) out of the public consciousness.

As nautical archeology is a hobby of mine and not unrelated to my own research, I can safely state that Ballard actually does have scientific output, with articles in peer-reviewed publications. This for example is an article on black sea shipwrecks found by him and it offers quite a lot of scientific discussion on the subjects.

[Darth Wong]

Why would HuffPo even try to tie a 100,000 square mile flood into the Noah's Ark story? The Earth's surface covers 200 million square miles. Even with 70% water coverage, that's still 60 million square miles of land.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Bob Ballard is a professor in the department where I'm a graduate student. He does a LOT of serious ocean archaeology for deep water exploration of ancient shipwrecks with significant finds including, for the first time, human remains from 2,000+ years ago preserved in the Black Sea oxygen free layer. Also a lot of work on underwater vents and volcanic activity which is very useful... His research vessels collect data for people in our department on a regular basis--and our department does some important work, for instance, Dr. Stéphan Grilli in our department who are doing major tsunami and underwater landslide harm reduction analysis by developing highly accurate refinements of tsunami models so we can actually predict wave heights pretty much anywhere along a coastline.

What he was trying to say here is that is convinced we have evidence and are going to conclusively prove that the Black Sea flooding event was extremely rapid rather than gradual through the Sea of Mamara and the Hellespont/Bosporus. This is something that really happened, there is still scientific debate over whether it was rapid or slow. Ballard discovered it originally and is convinced it was rapid; he's going out again to find conclusive proof of that, which is not really a surprise. Anyway, Dr. Ballard's comment about the Ark is that he's finding evidence that the bible story was based on a real event, i.e., that it was a cultural memory of the Black Sea flood. This is a big pet theory of his... Which, if it's true, would refute the actual biblical story, among other things.

The fact that Huffpo managed to turn THAT into "Bob Ballard searches for Noah's ark jeebus" is a testament of how terrible a news source Huffpo is.

[CaptJodan]

Bob Ballard is a professor in the department where I'm a graduate student. He does a LOT of serious ocean archaeology for deep water exploration of ancient shipwrecks with significant finds including, for the first time, human remains from 2,000+ years ago preserved in the Black Sea oxygen free layer. Also a lot of work on underwater vents and volcanic activity which is very useful... His research vessels collect data for people in our department on a regular basis--and our department does some important work, for instance, Dr. Stéphan Grilli in our department who are doing major tsunami and underwater landslide harm reduction analysis by developing highly accurate refinements of tsunami models so we can actually predict wave heights pretty much anywhere along a coastline.

What he was trying to say here is that is convinced we have evidence and are going to conclusively prove that the Black Sea flooding event was extremely rapid rather than gradual through the Sea of Mamara and the Hellespont/Bosporus. This is something that really happened, there is still scientific debate over whether it was rapid or slow. Ballard discovered it originally and is convinced it was rapid; he's going out again to find conclusive proof of that, which is not really a surprise. Anyway, Dr. Ballard's comment about the Ark is that he's finding evidence that the bible story was based on a real event, i.e., that it was a cultural memory of the Black Sea flood. This is a big pet theory of his... Which, if it's true, would refute the actual biblical story, among other things.

The fact that Huffpo managed to turn THAT into "Bob Ballard searches for Noah's ark jeebus" is a testament of how terrible a news source Huffpo is.

Thanks for shedding light on this. It does seem like Huffpo twisted this story way out of proportion. But we all know the majority of their readers are Christian, and thus this is their way of making an otherwise "dull" story interesting to their readers.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Bob Ballard is a professor in the department where I'm a graduate student. He does a LOT of serious ocean archaeology for deep water exploration of ancient shipwrecks with significant finds including, for the first time, human remains from 2,000+ years ago preserved in the Black Sea oxygen free layer. Also a lot of work on underwater vents and volcanic activity which is very useful... His research vessels collect data for people in our department on a regular basis--and our department does some important work, for instance, Dr. Stéphan Grilli in our department who are doing major tsunami and underwater landslide harm reduction analysis by developing highly accurate refinements of tsunami models so we can actually predict wave heights pretty much anywhere along a coastline.

What he was trying to say here is that is convinced we have evidence and are going to conclusively prove that the Black Sea flooding event was extremely rapid rather than gradual through the Sea of Mamara and the Hellespont/Bosporus. This is something that really happened, there is still scientific debate over whether it was rapid or slow. Ballard discovered it originally and is convinced it was rapid; he's going out again to find conclusive proof of that, which is not really a surprise. Anyway, Dr. Ballard's comment about the Ark is that he's finding evidence that the bible story was based on a real event, i.e., that it was a cultural memory of the Black Sea flood. This is a big pet theory of his... Which, if it's true, would refute the actual biblical story, among other things.

The fact that Huffpo managed to turn THAT into "Bob Ballard searches for Noah's ark jeebus" is a testament of how terrible a news source Huffpo is.

Thanks for the insight.

Also, I had no idea that you were at URI. Do you live down in Narragansett?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Thanks for the insight.

Also, I had no idea that you were at URI. Do you live down in Narragansett?

No, heh. I came from out west, where much longer commutes are normative, so I live in the middle of nowhere.