the great flood and the great comet
Archeologist Bruce Masse thinks that the Great Flood of Genesis really happened and that it was caused by something unearthly. However, that unearthly power wasn’t God, but a comet three miles wide slamming into the Indian Ocean, triggering what we’d describe as nothing less than the end of the world as we know it…
Earth, 2807 BC. For a few months, the ancients have been watching shooting stars and strange lights in the skies. Comets were bad omens in many cultures so it’s very likely that astrologers and other scholars were on alert. But without modern equipment, they wouldn’t have seen the giant chunk of rock that pierces through the atmosphere and plunges into the sea. The impact triggers a basin-wide tsunami that unleashes 600 foot waves from Australia to India and into the Middle East. Water vapor triggers horrifying rains across thousands of miles of coastline. The heat from the impact, combined with moisture in the air, starts hurricanes across much of the world’s tropics. Some 80% of the human race perishes in the disaster.
It’s the perfect plot line for a disaster movie’s worst case scenario. Now we just need a rugged hero, a soundtrack from a veteran rock band and a young, dashing apprentice to inherit all the glory after our rugged hero makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the rest of humanity. To be perfectly fair, impacts happen all the time and its not inconceivable that a major one could’ve happened in the ancient past. But the evidence is somewhat slim, the casualty numbers seem to be way too high, the mythological evidence for the great floods might not mean anything in the grand scheme of things and finally, would a comet impact really cause so much damage?
An impact event that causes a hyper-tsunami would leave behind plenty of physical evidence which Masse says exists in the form of chevrons across the coastlines of Africa and Asia. Well, the issue here is that the chevrons were spotted using Google Earth which can’t tell you when those features were formed. With almost 71% of the surface being covered by water, the Earth’s coastlines are a study in floods and tsunamis. To confirm his hypothesis, Masse would need to date the fossils and sediment layers from all the chevrons he found and make sure they match as closely as possible. Google Earth is a great tool to get your bearings, but it’s not a reliable measurement device. It’s meant for casual use and it doesn’t provide the resolution a scientist would need to study a landmark.
The other problem is that Masse might be giving comet impacts too much power. Yes, comets slamming into the middle of the ocean would cause terrifying tsunamis. No question. Vapor in the atmosphere would have to come down as torrential rains. Absolutely. But a swarm of giant hurricanes engulfing the tropics? Probably not. Hurricanes require constant heat to form and strengthen. Impact events provide a lot of heat but that heat is quickly diffused. It’s possible a comet fueled hurricane could form, but it wouldn’t be part of a giant swarm and it’s unlikely to be more powerful than modern, run of the mill monsoons. And if the event killed some 80% of all humans on Earth, who would be left to write down what happened? Imagine Earth today sans some 5.2 billion people. Civilization would collapse. There would be a Dark Age like no other. There’s no evidence for the end of the vast majority of societies and nations in 2807 BC.
That brings us to the mythological evidence. Masse calculates the time and supporting cues for a comet impact from two of some 175 flood stories across the world. One of these legends is Chinese which is perplexing as China isn’t near the Indian Ocean and wouldn’t have anything to do with tsunamis and monsoons in that basin. Their legends are much more likely to describe infamous Japanese tsunamis that reached their shores. And what about the other 173 legends? Why are they discarded? How can you just throw away so many stories and derive your impact dates from a legend of a nation in the wrong geographic location?
It seems that Masse is unintentionally falling into the same trap as Biblical archeologists. They take the Bible as a history book and try to match real events or manipulate theories of floods, wars and impact events into a scriptural frame. But the Bible wasn’t intended to be literal and the fundamentalist literalism we see today is a relatively recent development. Some stories we see in the Old Testament and the Gospels are just stories that play on ancient cultures, events and politics, often very subtly. In today’s world, we’ve been influenced by scriptural literalism and there’s a temptation to give one’s theory an instant aura of credibility by attaching it to a Biblical passage. We have several highly plausible ideas of how the flood story was born. Why should we go out of our way and conjure up questionable tales to explain three chapters of an ancient book with a strange and conflicting history?
