The Catastrophic Drowning of the Black Sea and the Science behind Early Flood Legends

William B. F. Ryan is the Doherty Senior Scholar at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and an adjunct professor of earth and environmental science at Columbia University. He is the coauthor, with Walter Pitman, of Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History. Together these geologists gathered scientific evidence that could help explain the story of Noah and the great flood. Ryan and Pitman hypothesize that about 7,500 years ago the global warming that followed the last Ice Age caused seas to rise. When sea levels rose beyond a critical point, the Mediterranean Sea overflowed, deluging the Black Sea basin with salty water and destroying the fertile plains around the once-shallow freshwater lake.