We watch a LOT of science shows. Discover, History Channel, Nova Science Now, The Universe…..my 5 year old already knows most of her planets. A while back I watched a show on Discover about how Noah’s flood really happened. Now, I saw a previous show that postulated the Noah’s Ark story was a ripoff of a dude named Gilgamesh who was the moral of a story about the Euphrates flooding. It always struck me as lame.
Well, a geologist also thought it was lame too – largely because the flood story was found in at least 15 cultures in diverse areas. She set about proving that the Noah’s flood story was actually the result of a tsunami caused by a volcano collapsing into the Mediterranean. Radar around the volcano and around the various shorelines show softer earth where it was dumped or where the tsunami scraped the shoreline. Pretty cool, huh?
More and more we are finding out that the stories and “myths” we always attributed to superstition and/or ignorance were actually events that happened. So…it got me wondering. If the Noah’s Ark story could be true, why couldn’t the Red Sea parting also be true?
Interestingly enough, I went to Wikipedia for an article to give some background for those who don’t know the story ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Red_Sea) . Apparently they think the crossing may not have been at what we call the “Red Sea” today, but a swampy place called the “Reed Sea”. Already this is sounding more plausible than the traditional tale we are accustomed to. And it also lists a volcano erupting as the cause for multiple tsunamis that would have caused flooding. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thera#Speculation_on_an_Exodus_Connection
<Disclaimer: I am NOT at all religious. I’m hovering somewhere between Agnostic and Atheist. So this isn’t some attempt to justify Bible-thumping. >
I am not a geologist. I’m just a science show nut with a wandering mind. So I’m putting this question out there in the hopes that someone with some actual knowledge will a) get interested and figure it out b) know the answer and share it with the rest of us. So please, speculate: What kind of geological event could have caused the Red Sea to temporarily recede? Is there any proof that it did, in fact recede? (Think radar scans, disturbed earth, rocks in places they shouldn’t be, pieces of unfortunate Egyptian armor at the bottom of the sea in a cluster). A meteor? Earthquake? Tsunami? A sinkhole? A volcano? If the Thera eruption wasn’t the cause of the receding sea, then what was?
