 |
| The North Sea, Storegga underwater landslide event run-out, associated deposit locations and core ELF001A. Location of deposits associated with Storegga slip follow data in summarized [8]. |
With some 40% of Americans still believing in Noah's Ark, it's necessary, even though astonishing for the 21st Century, in an age in which information is so readily and freely available, to debunk it yet again. Fortunately, two articles published recently help to do just that.
The first concerns a paper published by a team of scientists led by Professor Vincent Gaffney of the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford, England, which presents evidence that about 8,150 years ago, three successive giant waves tore across ancient land bridge between UK and Europe, in the area now submerged beneath the North Sea - some 4,000 years before the Biblical flood is supposed to have happened.
Scientists think this may have been the final inundation of 'Doggerland' which had been becoming submerged due to rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice-Age as glaciers melted. The tsunami were caused by the so-called Storegga Slide, when an are of sea-bed off Scandinavia, the size of Scotland, suddenly shifted - an event probably connected to the loss of the weight of glacial ice.
According to Bradford University News:
 |
| Geormorphological reconstruction of the palaeolandscape off the east coast of England c. 8.2 ka cal BP. Above: Present coast of East England (grey) with offshore area showing the coastline reconstruction at approximately 8.2 ka cal BP, position of moraine ridge (after Dove et al. [20]), location of core and seismic line example. Below: 2D seismic line acquired through core location showing major reflection horizons, base surface and the major erosional boundary identified as a regional event. |
Cores from an area south of a marine trough named the Outer Dowsing Deep provided nearly half a metre of tsunami-like deposits, stones and broken shells sandwiched between laminated estuarine sediments.
Dating indicated they were contemporary with the Storegga event, while analysis including geochemical, sedimentological, palaeomagnetic, isotopic, palaeobotany and ‘sedaDNA’ (sedentary DNA) techniques showed the deposits could be readily interpreted as resulting from a tsunami.
Unlike a global flood, a tsunami pushes all before it and deposits it at its furthest encroachment on land, up river estuaries, etc. Any subsequent catastrophic flood such as the biblical one would have been would remove these discrete deposits delineating the furthest reaches of a tsunami and replace them with a continuous deposit of silt. Moreover, this silt would contain a jumble of fossils and debris from all over the world since there would have been no barriers to its mixing.
The evidence of this tsunami would not have been there following the alleged biblical Global flood. However, Some evidence of it might have been preserved in folk tales and origin myths if we are to believe the Noachian flood left such folk memories, including the allegedly word-perfect Hebrew flood myth (based as it is on an earlier Mesopotamian myth from the area of modern Iraq.) There are no such folk memories in the UK ot the countries and cultures bordering the North Sea.
This team's paper is published open access in Geosciences:
Abstract
Doggerland was a landmass occupying an area currently covered by the North Sea until marine inundation took place during the mid-Holocene, ultimately separating the British landmass from the rest of Europe. The Storegga Event, which triggered a tsunami reflected in sediment deposits in the northern North Sea, northeast coastlines of the British Isles and across the North Atlantic, was a major event during this transgressive phase. The spatial extent of the Storegga tsunami however remains unconfirmed as, to date, no direct evidence for the event has been recovered from the southern North Sea. We present evidence of a tsunami deposit in the southern North Sea at the head of a palaeo-river system that has been identified using seismic survey. The evidence, based on lithostratigraphy, geochemical signatures, macro and microfossils and sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), supported by optical stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating, suggests that these deposits were a result of the tsunami. Seismic identification of this stratum and analysis of adjacent cores showed diminished traces of the tsunami which was largely removed by subsequent erosional processes. Our results confirm previous modelling of the impact of the tsunami within this area of the southern North Sea, and also indicate that these effects were temporary, localized, and mitigated by the dense woodland and topography of the area. We conclude that clear physical remnants of the wave in these areas are likely to be restricted to now buried, palaeo-inland basins and incised river valley systems.
Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, Martin Bates, Roselyn L. Ware, Tim Kinnaird, Benjamin Gearey, Tom Hill, Richard Telford, Cathy Batt, Ben Stern, John Whittaker, Sarah Davies, Mohammed Ben Sharada, Rosie Everett, Rebecca Cribdon, Logan Kistler, Sam Harris, Kevin Kearney, James Walker, Merle Muru, Derek Hamilton, Matthew Law, Alex Finlay, Richard Bates and Robin G. Allaby, 2020.
Multi-Proxy Evidence for the Impact of the Storegga Slide Tsunami on the Early Holocene Landscapes of the Southern North Sea.
Geosciences 2020, 10(7), 270; doi.org/10.3390/geosciences10070270
Copyright: © 2020 The authors. Published by MDPI
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)
So, the first of these articles presents evidence for a geological event that predated any putative biblical flood. This evidence would have been swept away by any such flood and replaced by a global layer of silt that simply isn't there.
The second article is about the discovery by scientists from Warwick University, England, which they are calling a Breakthrough in studying ancient DNA from Doggerland that separates the UK from Europe.
This work was part of the larger cooperative work reported in the first paper above and concerns analysing DNA from the sediment which have been underwater for several thousand years (sedaDNA), such as those found at the bottom of the North Sea in the are devastated by the massive tsunamis which finally inundated 'Doggerland'.
As the Warwick University press release explains:
A number of innovative breakthroughs were achieved by the University of Warwick scientists in terms of analysing the sedaDNA. One of these was the concept of biogenomic mass, where for the first time they were able to see the how the biomass changes with events, evidence of this presented in the paper refers to the large woody mass of trees from the tsunami found in the DNA of the ancient sediment.
New ways of authenticating the sedaDNA were also developed, as current methods of authentication do not apply to sedaDNA which has been damaged whilst under the sea for thousands of years because there is too little information for each individual species. Researchers therefore came up with a new way, metagenomic assessment methodology, whereby the characteristic damage found at the ends of ancient DNA molecules is collectively analysed across all species rather than one.
Alongside this a key part of analysing the sedaDNA is to determine whether or not it was deposited in situ or has moved over time. This led researchers to develop statistical methods to establish which scenario was appropriate, using stratigraphic integrity they were able to determine that the sedaDNA in the sediment deposits had not moved a massive amount since deposition by assessing the biomolecules vertical movement in the core column of the sedaDNA. [My emphasis]
What we have here then is evidence that once the Storegga Tsunamis had inundated 'Doggerland' the sediment that settled out has remained in situ until today.
Had the biblical flood happened a few thousand years later, of course, this would not only not have remained undisturbed, but it would have been swept away entirely to be replaced by a continuous global layer of silt, as described above. Not only is this silt layer not there, the deposit that WAS laid down by the Storegga Tsunamis has not been touched.
And so, once again with no effort of intent, simply by producing real-world evidence, teams of scientists have once again refuted another Bible myth. Whatever Noah's Ark might be a hazy folk memory of, it wasn't global and it had no effect on the coastal area of North-Western Europe or on the North Sea.
The evidnce of science must prevail over mythes. I salute you for research into this sillyness.
ReplyDelete