The man who found the Titanic says he has discovered new evidence that the Great Blood of the Bible was based on actual events.
Robert Ballard, one of the world's most notable underwater archaeologists, interviewed with Christiane Amanpour for a two-part ABC News special called "Back to the Beginning" that will air on Dec. 21 and Dec. 28 at 9 p.m. EST. The special delves into the history of the bible from Genesis to Jesus, according to ABC News.
Ballard details that he believes the Great Flood can be traced back to a time, 12,000 years ago, when the world was covered in ice. The glaciers, which he describes as reaching heights of a mile over his Connecticut home and spanning 15 million kilometers to the North Pole, then began to melt, causing massive floods of the world's oceans
"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods," Ballard said.
Ballard and his team piggy-backed on a theory developed by two Columbia University scientists that proposed the Black Sea region could have been the location of the Great Flood. Once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, immense floods with the power of two hundred times that of Niagara Falls overwhelmed the waterway, converting it into a salty body, the researchers said.
"We went in there to look for the flood," he said. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed ... The land that went under stayed under."
During his exploration, Ballard discovered an ancient shoreline 400 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. He estimated that the catastrophy that wiped out the shoreline occurred around 5,000 BC, which coincides with the time that experts believe the Great Flood happened.
"It probably was a bad day," Ballard said. "At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under."
According to that theory, those who happened to survive the flood went on to tell stories of it that were passed down generation to generation, and eventually became the biblical account of Noah that is now known.
