The Persistent Clues: Did a Great Flood Really Happen?

The story of a devastating global flood, so great it wiped out all life except for a select few, is most famously told in the Book of Genesis. While many today treat the “Great Flood” as a simple myth, the evidence scattered across history and geology drops some pretty compelling hints that this worldwide disaster might have actually occurred.

Here are five clues that suggest the great flood wasn’t just a story:

1. Flood Legends Are Everywhere

Think about it: Almost every culture around the globe, from Mesopotamia and Nigeria to China and the Americas, has a legend about a great flood. Not only do these stories exist, but many of them seem to point toward similar time frames for the disaster.

For me, the simple, ubiquitous presence of flood legends is hard to dismiss as a mere coincidence. Communication tools certainly weren’t efficient thousands of years ago. So, how did civilisations separated by vast oceans and continents all come up with the same core story?

Back in those days, people couldn’t just “Vlog” or upload to “Ancient Tube.” Stories were the primary way to pass down information about real, witnessed events. The fact that people from all corners of the world have myths and legends about a massive deluge suggests that people from all corners of the world actually witnessed one.

2. Evidence of a Great Flood in Ancient China

Like many other civilisations, ancient Chinese texts say their civilisation began right after a great flood. Recently, archaeologists found evidence of a massive flood on the Yellow River that provides a clue about the almost-mythical first dynasty of China, the Xia Dynasty.

The ancient legends describe a flood with waves as tall as a 30-story building, crushing everything in its path and seemingly never-ending. It was only through the innovative efforts of Yu the Great, who channelled the water back to its source, that China was saved, leading him to become the ruler of the Xia dynasty.

For a long time, this 4,000-year-old story was believed to be a complete myth. However, researchers who observed the Yellow River’s Jishi Gorge area found that an ancient landslide had created a massive, 660-foot-tall dam. This dam blocked the river and formed an enormous lake. When the dam eventually broke months later, it unleashed a colossal flood that obliterated everything in its path.

Researchers found sediments providing evidence of a flood that surged as high as 50 meters above current river levels. Carbon dating of these remnants later revealed that the flood would have occurred around 1920 BC, which, amazingly, aligns with the approximate time of the Xia Dynasty’s beginning.

3. Dramatic Rise in Global Sea Levels

A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documented evidence that water levels rose dramatically about 12,000 years ago, a shift that could theoretically rewrite our understanding of geological history.

Satellite imagery has revealed evidence of significant water recession over the past 12,000 years. This time period also saw a major post-glacial shift, which explains the massive displacement of icebergs at the end of the last Ice Age.

This suggests that a great flood could have happened thousands of years ago, potentially triggered by a pole shift or changes in the Earth’s magnetic resonance. The sudden, massive meltwater from glaciers would have rushed toward the world’s oceans, causing floods everywhere.

4. Submerged Civilisations

There are massive underwater structures and sunken discoveries all around the world, pointing to civilisations that were rapidly swallowed by the sea.

One example is the city found off the coast of West India in the Gulf of Khambhat. Local fishermen had passed down stories for generations about an underwater city in the area, but no one took them seriously until India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology conducted a pollution survey. Researchers found huge structures at the bottom of the ocean. The retrieved artefacts were carbon-dated to be about 10,000 years old, resting 130 feet under the water.

Other strange discoveries include the wheel tracks found in the Maltese archipelago, which look like they deliberately plunge off steep ridges, cliffs, and even into the sea, continuing underwater.

5. The Black Sea Deluge Theory

Our final clue started as a theory from two Columbia University researchers. They proposed that a “mother of all floods” occurred in the Black Sea region. According to them, the Black Sea was once a freshwater lake surrounded by land until it was catastrophically flooded by the Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was monumental, sweeping away everything in its path.

To investigate the theory’s validity, Robert Ballard, the famous deep-sea explorer who discovered the Titanic, searched for remnants of the flood 400 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. Ballard and his team found an ancient shoreline. After carbon dating shells found on that shoreline, Ballard concluded that whatever happened in the area occurred around 5,000 BC. This date is believed by some experts to be the approximate time of the Biblical account of Noah’s flood.

I absolutely believe that massive flooding events, whether a single global event or smaller, different-scale floods happening across the globe at different times, did happen. The widespread stories are simply too numerous to ignore.

But let’s think about this for a second. If a massive flood started right now, what would you do? Is it safer to get on a plane, even if you have nowhere to land? Or is your best bet a submarine, hoping you don’t run out of supplies? I guess you could always try to float and just eat fish for the rest of your life!