Floods

[iceaura]

Merely to draw attention to this rapid flooding of the Persian Gulf basin, as being another dramatic - and not erosion-based -

This is speculative. The same can be said of the Gulf flooding. We know it happened. We know people were there. The event would have been beyond the experience of anyone alive and would have directly impacted multiple generations.

It was hardly an "event".
Flooding not based on sudden and unexpected events occurring without warning - "erosion based" in some way - does not look fast enough to generate such stories.

You are talking about increases in the water level smaller and slower than ordinary storm and wind and and wave and tidal surges provide - daily and seasonal events.

The notion that such long term one way progressions would even be interpreted as a "flood" is problematic, the idea that people living on the ocean - maritime cultures - would be caught short, with no time to move possessions or even apparently find their boats, drowned by the hundreds, in the course of a moderate and easily observed (forewarned) long term rise in the water levels along the shore like that, just strikes me as implausible, is all.

But then, who knows?

 

[iceaura]

So they didn't need a big flood to imagine a huge flood.

The factor in need of explanation is the concordance of imagination - that they all imagined the same basic thing. The drowned civilizations and all the people, the water covering everything as far as the eye could see, the one guy with the boat.

We don't need actual space aliens to imagine little green men - but if we found dozens of different cultures and languages all over South America and over hundreds of years of time telling the same basic story of some encounter with little green men from the sky, the "ordinary life" explanations - people dressing in green clothes, camouflaged hunters of the forest, etc - would run thin after a while.

 

[sideshowbob]

We don't need actual space aliens to imagine little green men - but if we found dozens of different cultures and languages all over South America and over hundreds of years of time telling the same basic story of some encounter with little green men from the sky, the "ordinary life" explanations - people dressing in green clothes, camouflaged hunters of the forest, etc - would run thin after a while.

You seem to be making my point. If little green men were a widespread cultural phenomenon we would conclude lots of little visits by little green men at various times in various locations. We wouldn't look for one large visitation.

 

[exchemist]

It was hardly an "event".
Flooding not based on sudden and unexpected events occurring without warning - "erosion based" in some way - does not look fast enough to generate such stories.

You are talking about increases in the water level smaller and slower than ordinary storm and wind and and wave and tidal surges provide - daily and seasonal events.

The notion that such long term one way progressions would even be interpreted as a "flood" is problematic, the idea that people living on the ocean - maritime cultures - would be caught short, with no time to move possessions or even apparently find their boats, drowned by the hundreds, in the course of a moderate and easily observed (forewarned) long term rise in the water levels along the shore like that, just strikes me as implausible, is all.

But then, who knows?

This would have been nothing like a storm surge, in which water advances and then retreats again within a few days. This would have been 3m/day of continuous advance for years on end. I think the loss of homes and communities and the constant trek of homeless people seeking higher ground would have been traumatic, not least because it would have been quite unlike any normal kind of flood, in which one can normally wait it out and go back.

 

[timojin]

Not quite. The Big Melt was pretty much over by then, and the glaciers were gone (leaving behind a strange and hydrologically very active landscape, with remnant ice ice buried everywhere, rebounding bedrock, and water in large quantities finding its paths to the sea.
I can't find a counterexample. Can you?

You are mistaken by saying the melt was over . Mountain on the Ararat in Armenia and other range from Iran they are at the present tributary to the Persian gulf,
So please bring your evidence if you have .

 

[iceaura]

We wouldn't look for one large visitation.

We would look for visitations by little green men. Not something else, normal in people's experience.

This would have been nothing like a storm surge, in which water advances and then retreats again within a few days. This would have been 3m/day of continuous advance for years on end.

In other words, not like the flood stories.

I think the loss of homes and communities and the constant trek of homeless people seeking higher ground would have been traumatic,

I think you are confusing horizontal with vertical advance, and overlooking human ability to see and predict such things over time.
The rate of vertical change would only produce that kind of steady horizontal advance over quite flat ground - and that ground would have been flooded out by tides and storms and even rain regularly, long before the background rise got there. My guess is people would have moved before being flooded out, and not rebuilt on low flat ground in the obvious floodplain of a rising ocean - in other words, seldom flooded out, even less often by surprise, and not at all with no way to escape via boat etc.

the idea that people living on the ocean - maritime cultures - would be caught short, with no time to move possessions or even apparently find their boats, drowned by the hundreds,

 

[exchemist]

We would look for visitations by little green men. Not something else, normal in people's experience.

In other words, not like the flood stories.

I think you are confusing horizontal with vertical advance, and overlooking human ability to see and predict such things over time.
The rate of vertical change would only produce that kind of steady horizontal advance over quite flat ground - and that ground would have been flooded out by tides and storms and even rain regularly, long before the background rise got there. My guess is people would have moved before being flooded out, and not rebuilt on low flat ground in the obvious floodplain of a rising ocean - in other words, seldom flooded out, even less often by surprise, and not at all with no way to escape via boat etc.

Indeed, nothing like the floods stories, apart from the fact it was a huge flood.

 

[iceaura]

Indeed, nothing like the floods stories, apart from the fact it was a huge flood.

Exactly. No surprise, no mass drowning, no emergency rescue of anybody, no loss of animals or community, no hero of unusual foresight or luck or capability, no long journey of unprepared refugee hardship - and no restoration of former landscape, no recession and restart. Unless one assumes a fairly remarkable lack of observation and foresight among the entire community, nobody even gets wet - and the new homes have a nice view of the new ocean.

 

[exchemist]

Exactly. No surprise, no mass drowning, no emergency rescue of anybody, no loss of animals or community, no hero of unusual foresight or luck or capability, no long journey of unprepared refugee hardship - and no restoration of former landscape, no recession and restart. Unless one assumes a fairly remarkable lack of observation and foresight among the entire community, nobody even gets wet - and the new homes have a nice view of the new ocean.

Well yes, except that you have a trail of homeless refugees over a period of centuries, trekking Northwest, displaced by water. I think I would it consider it hardship to have to leave the home and lands my family or tribe had had for generations. Today's Palestinians and Syrians certainly seem to find it so.

I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make with all this rhetoric. The conjecture is that real, huge floods might have given rise to flood myths. That is all.

 

[sideshowbob]

We would look for visitations by little green men. Not something else, normal in people's experience.

On the contrary, we always look for normal first. If one person sees little green men we look for an explanation that doesn't require little green men - for example, men who are slightly smaller than "normal" and appear greenish in certain light. IF there were worldwide sightings of little green men, we would eventually have to conclude that little green men exist. But we would NOT conclude that little green men visited earth once and somehow the news was magically spread to every culture. We would conclude that little green men visited most of those cultures - i.e. that the visits of little green men was commonplace.

It's the same with floods. If there was one big flood that inspired one story, what inspired the myriad other stories? On the other hand, if most of the stories were inspired by ordinary floods, why not all of them?

 

[timojin]

We would look for visitations by little green men. Not something else, normal in people's experience.

In other words, not like the flood stories.

I think you are confusing horizontal with vertical advance, and overlooking human ability to see and predict such things over time.
The rate of vertical change would only produce that kind of steady horizontal advance over quite flat ground - and that ground would have been flooded out by tides and storms and even rain regularly, long before the background rise got there. My guess is people would have moved before being flooded out, and not rebuilt on low flat ground in the obvious floodplain of a rising ocean - in other words, seldom flooded out, even less often by surprise, and not at all with no way to escape via boat etc.

Why don't you go to discuss about Trump, with Jepstole and exercise your rhetoric, and live flood to people who are interested in ancient physical events.
Tank you.

 

[iceaura]

On the contrary, we always look for normal first.

1)And when we find stuff that today's normal doesn't cover very well, we look for something that does.
2) Large, sudden, unique, and catastrophic floods were "normal" then, in the sense that although infrequent many peoples had one in their past. If I recall, there were something like a dozen of the fantastic jokelhaups that drained Lake Agassiz in North America, for example (50 meter standing waves in the outflow) - not to mention the ones occasionally draining the eastern Great Lakes along the ice front.

If there was one big flood that inspired one story, what inspired the myriad other stories?

First guess: A similar big flood - maybe the same one, maybe one of the others.

On the other hand, if most of the stories were inspired by ordinary floods, why not all of them?

The Noachian Flood stories, with their commonalities, do not appear to have been inspired by ordinary floods. That's the root level observation. That's subjective, of course.

I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make with all this rhetoric.

Ok. Sorry to bang on.

 

[sideshowbob]

The Noachian Flood stories, with their commonalities, do not appear to have been inspired by ordinary floods.

And trips to other planets don't "appear" to be inspired by trips to ordinary places? I think they do.

When you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras. Zebras do exist but the hoof-beats that most people hear are more likely to be horses.

 

[iceaura]

When you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras.

When fifteen different stories all say the horse was striped black and white, nobody could ride it, nobody had seen anything like it before or since, and it came from far away, I'm going to regard a priori evidence of zebra nomadic migrations through the area as strongly indicative.

 

[sideshowbob]

When fifteen different stories all say the horse was striped black and white, nobody could ride it, nobody had seen anything like it before or since, and it came from far away, I'm going to regard a priori evidence of zebra nomadic migrations through the area as strongly indicative.

But that isn't what we have. We have a hundred stories about hoof-beats; seven of them are about striped horses; one has red and blue stripes, two have rainbow stripes. Somebody was clearly making something up. Maybe one of them wasn't but we have no compelling reason to think anything extraordinary happened.

 

[river]

Geologicaly , why are there fossils in high mountain regions ?

Some contened that a world wide flood happened .

Perhaps , but that would mean that salt in the soil would be found . If so , then plants could not survive , let alone to actually exist .

 

[Seattle]

Geologicaly , why are there fossils in high mountain regions ?

Some contened that a world wide flood happened .

Perhaps , but that would mean that salt in the soil would be found . If so , then plants could not survive , let alone to actually exist .

What does fossils in high mountain regions have to do with a flood? It's depends on what fossils you are talking about of course.

If you are talking about fossils of sea creatures then that's generally an indication of volcanism. The rock with the marine fossils that is currently in a mountainous area was at the bottom of the ocean. Volcanism lifted that rock material up.

That has nothing to do with a flood however. Regarding salt...that would be washing away long ago.

 

[exchemist]

What does fossils in high mountain regions have to do with a flood? It's depends on what fossils you are talking about of course.

If you are talking about fossils of sea creatures then that's generally an indication of volcanism. The rock with the marine fossils that is currently in a mountainous area was at the bottom of the ocean. Volcanism lifted that rock material up.

That has nothing to do with a flood however. Regarding salt...that would be washing away long ago.

Regarding salt, my post 119 has a link to some dramatic pictures of "salt glaciers" in the Zagros mountains of Iran. These are salt deposits, left behind by evaporation of shallow parts of ancient oceans and incorporated into rock strata, now erupting at the surface in slow motion, from the rocks.

I would not describe fossils at the tops of mountains as being due to "volcanism". They are due to the tectonic activity that causes fold mountain belts to form - notably along convergent plate margins involving continental crust. Other forms of tectonic activity result in volcanism.

 

[Seattle]

Regarding salt, my post 119 has a link to some dramatic pictures of "salt glaciers" in the Zagros mountains of Iran. These are salt deposits, left behind by evaporation of shallow parts of ancient oceans and incorporated into rock strata, now erupting at the surface in slow motion, from the rocks.

I would not describe fossils at the tops of mountains as being due to "volcanism". They are due to the tectonic activity that causes fold mountain belts to form - notably along convergent plate margins involving continental crust. Other forms of tectonic activity result in volcanism.

Yes, I'd agree that the more accurate way to describe it is due to tectonic activity rather than volcanism.

My point was that it wasn't due to a flood.

 

[sculptor]

question
What would you expect to be on the surface of the earth before the continents formed?
Archean?