Echoes Of Ancient Cataclysms In The Baltic Sea

Abstract

The observation that human societies are shaped by the natural environment appears in the earliest treatises on cultural diversity. Scholars have focused their attention on the ordinary conditions of the environment (weather patterns, topography, natural resources, and other enduring features) or on recurrent events in an area (earthquakes, floods, droughts, etc.), when trying to account for local inhabitants’ distinctive customs and beliefs. Yet recent investigations of ancient cataclysms suggest that truly extraordinary events can also have a great and lasting impact. For example, the recent underwater exploration of the Black Sea by Robert Ballard (2001), featured in National Geographic magazine, confirmed the findings of the geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman in Noah’s Flood (1998), pointing to a catastrophic flood circa 5600 BC. Salt water from the Mediterranean Sea broke through the Bosporus into what is now the Black Sea but was once a glacial freshwater lake about 150 meters below present sea level. The sudden inundation of human settlements along the old shoreline is a plausible source of accounts of a world flood: in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and other ancient writings. Another example involves the massive volcanic explosion, described by David Keys in Catastrophe (1999) that apparently split the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java around 535 A.D. It spewed enough volcanic dust into the atmosphere to darken the sun for a year or more. This led to drastic weather shifts, crop failures, plague outbreaks, the collapse of old civilizations, and the rise of new ones around the globe. What separates these studies from mere ruminations is the hard scientific evidence for the cataclysms. In the first case, there is an underwater beachline in the Black Sea, below which the remains of freshwater mollusks and sediments have been found, with a radiocarbon date of 7,500 years ago. In the second case, ice core samples from both Greenland and Antarctica show unusual amounts of