The
Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the
Black Sea circa 5600 BC due to waters from the
Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the
Bosporus Strait. The hypothesis made headlines when
The New York Times published it in December 1996, shortly before it was published in an academic journal.
NYT 1996Yanko-Hombach
et al. 2007 The oscillating hypothesis specifies that over the last 30,000 years, water has intermittently flowed back and forth between the Black Sea and the
Aegean Sea in relatively small magnitudes, and does not necessarily presuppose that there occurred any sudden "refilling" events.
Flood hypothesis
In 1997, William Ryan and
Walter Pitman published evidence that a massive flooding of the Black Sea occurred about 5600 BCE through the
Bosporus, following this scenario. Before that date,
glacial meltwater had turned the Black and
Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes draining into the
Aegean Sea. As
glaciers retreated, some of the rivers emptying into the
Black Sea declined in volume and changed course to drain into the
North Sea.
National Oceanographic and......
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