Prehistoric floods caused by sea level rise due to melting ice during the last ice age flooded large areas of land, including Doggerland, Beringia, and Sundaland. Some floods occurred catastrophically, such as the hypothetical inundation of the Black Sea region approximately 5,600 years ago. Other floods were caused by the breaking of ice dams, and prehistoric floods appear to be common on geological timescales.
Most people are familiar with the story of the Great Flood, or Deluge, in the Bible. What is less well known is that there were indeed floods in the past, prehistoric floods, mostly as a result of sea level rise due to the melting of ice at the end of the last ice age, over a long period between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago. These may have inspired the flood myths.
During the last ice age, northern Eurasia and North America were covered in thick glaciers, making them uninhabitable. As a sort of compromise, large swathes of land now under water were once dry, because much of the world’s water was locked up in ice sheets. This includes Doggerland, the North Sea area between the UK and the Netherlands; Beringia, which the first men crossed to access the Americas; Sundaland, a tropical region of present-day Indonesia, and many others.
As the ice melted, sea levels rose and flooded the land. Usually this process was too slow to notice, occurring over hundreds or thousands of years, but sometimes it was fast enough to be noticed in a human lifetime, and occasionally it is thought to have occurred catastrophically, as floods prehistoric.
One of the most talked about floods is the hypothetical inundation of the Black Sea region, which, if any, occurred approximately 5,600 years ago. The evidence comes in the form of large sills, or ruts, that would have been caused in a catastrophic overflow. Around the time of the last ice age, the Black Sea would have been disconnected from the Mediterranean. As the Mediterranean rose from water from the melting ice sheets, it would have risen above the crucial level for passing water through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea, increasing its depth by as much as 300 feet (100 m). This prehistoric flood would have flooded 60,000 square miles of land.
Other prehistoric floods are hypothesized to have occurred in the Caspian Sea, overflowing into the Black Sea, the Carpentaria Plain between Australia and New Guinea, the Aegean Basin and Doggerland. Some prehistoric floods are thought to have been caused by the breaking of ice dams, such as the Missoula Floods in present-day Washington state; Lake Agassiz, located near the present Great Lakes but larger than all of their volume combined; Lake Bonneville, located in present-day Great Basin; and Lake Objibway, just north of the present Great Lakes. Prehistoric floods, particularly caused by the comings and goings of glacial periods and glacial lakes, appear to be quite common on geological timescales.
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