May 16, 2023 07:00:00

Did the story of 'Noah's Ark' really happen?

Noah's story 'Noah's Ark' is a famous story that appears in the Old Testament, etc. A geomorphologist explains whether the 'great flood' that appears in Noah's Ark really happened.

Did Noah's flood really happen?

https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/religion/did-noahs-flood-really-happen

``What we know for sure in geology is that global flooding never happened,'' said David Montgomery, a geomorphology professor at the University of Washington. In Noah's Ark, it is said that the earth was filled with water enough to cover the surrounding mountains, but Mr. Montgomery said, ``The hypothesis that a global flood that literally covers the highest mountains in the world has occurred is , it can be denied because there is not so much water on the earth.'

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, even if the 'sky' were to open and the water in the atmosphere turned into rain and poured down all at once, the sea level would rise by only about 2.5 centimeters.

However, if we consider more than the water in the 'heavens', the results are a little different. According to NASA, if all the glaciers and ice sheets around the world melted, sea levels would rise by more than 60 meters, which would mean a little more water. Furthermore, a 2016

study published in the journal Nature Geoscience found that about 22.6 million cubic kilometers of groundwater is stored in the upper 2 kilometers of the crust, enough to cover land with a height of 180 meters. It is estimated that

Despite these factors, it is true that some cities in the world are several thousand meters above sea level, and Mount Everest, the highest mountain on earth, is 8849 meters above sea level. Moreover, geologists have found no evidence of a global cataclysm in the historical rock record.

But it's not so far-fetched when you consider that the cause of Noah's flood was not a global flood, but a local one. For example, oceanographer William Ryan et al., ``About 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea began to flow into the then-isolated Black Sea, causing massive floods around the Black Sea. He argues that the actual events were passed down orally in an allegorical way.

A paper published in the academic journal Quaternary Science Reviews argues that even if a flood occurred, it was much smaller than what Ryan et al. As such, the inspiration for the story of Noah's Ark is debatable, but there are many other flood stories around the world that seem to have been inspired by local events. To do. ``There could have been some geologically plausible floods that inspired Noah's Ark story,'' Montgomery explained.