ARCHAEOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS— Scientists plan to mount a major expedition this summer to look for remains of ancient settlements submerged in the Black Sea, a team including Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic wreck, announced here on 30 January. The archaeological treasure hunt is meant to test a controversial theory that fast-rising waters some 7500 years ago drove coastal dwellers inland at a dizzying 1 to 2 kilometers a day, a cataclysm that some researchers say could have spread farming into Central Europe and perhaps even account for the biblical tale of Noah's ark. In late 1997, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, published evidence from sediment cores that about 5500 B.C. the rising Mediterranean Sea topped the shallow Bosporus straits and began gushing into the nearby Black Sea, until then a landlocked lake. The flood raised water levels 15 centimeters a day; by the time it ended, the sea was up about 150 meters and an area the size of Florida was underwater ( Science , 20 February 1998, p. [1132][1]). Many oceanographers consider this flood scenario credible, but archaeologists are skeptical that the deluge altered the course of civilization. “I'm certain we have a flood,” says Pitman. “But did it cause a diaspora? We can only speculate.” Now some of this speculation will be put to the test. In July, a team from several institutions—including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ballard's Institute for Exploration (IFE), the University of Pennsylvania, and the Archaeological Museum in Sinop, Turkey—plans to use sonar to plumb the murky waters off Sinop for signs of settlements. A preliminary survey last July turned up promising results, says expedition co-leader David Mindell of MIT, who organized the conference on deep-sea archaeology (see p. [929][2]) where these findings were unveiled. According to Mindell, a side-scan sonar dragged from a hired fishing vessel revealed “shapes that are too large for a shipwreck and too regularly shaped to not be manmade” in coastal water 60 to 80 meters deep. If more probing by sonar indicates that the shapes are the remains of settlements, Mindell says, the team will use standard techniques—sediment coring and magnetometry, for instance—to date them. To test the theory fully, researchers will put on their detective hats and try to trace the hasty retreat of these erstwhile Black Sea dwellers—a migration that, if it happened, may be tied to the surge of farming across eastern Europe around the time of the flood. The effort is the fruit of a budding collaboration between Ballard and archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to look for a deep-sea trade route between Sinop and ports along the Black Sea's northern coast. “I was like a kid in a candy store when Bob laid down a map of the Black Sea and said, ‘Where shall we go?’” recalls Hiebert, who had begun land excavations around Sinop 3 years ago. The duo saw great potential for the preservation of artifacts—shipwrecks and other relics—in the Black Sea's oxygen-free waters below about 200 meters. “The anoxic bottom conditions make the waters rich with archaeological potential found nowhere else on Earth,” says Mindell. But after last summer's sonar survey, the team now thinks that there might be more sensational relics closer to shore. When Ballard, whose IFE is footing part of the expedition's cost, saw the grainy images of possible settlements, says Mindell, “he told me, ‘This is the next Titanic. ’” This summer, before going into deep water, the team will probe for near-shore settlements. The researchers say they aren't out to prove the veracity of the biblical flood story, in which Noah and his family built an ark and rounded up two of every creature on Earth. “Noah's flood is not a testable hypothesis,” says Hiebert. “We will test whether there was a strong level of occupation in the [Black Sea] basin when the sea level was low.” Of course, there is one way to test the Noah story directly, jokes Mindell: “We could look for pairs of animal skeletons, too.” [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.279.5354.1132 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.283.5404.929