The underwater explorer who found the wrecked Titanic continues to look for evidence consistent with the great Noahic flood, according to news reports.
Robert Ballard, who has been trying for more than a decade to prove the flood and Noah’s Ark, discussed his latest explorations in Turkey with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour.
“We went in there to look for the flood,” Ballard said of his work in Turkey. “Not just a low moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed…. The land that went under stayed under.”
ABC reported that Ballard, using advanced robotic technology, is able to explore events from nearly 12,000 ago, when much of the earth was covered in ice. Geologists theorize that the melting ice of that age would have surged through parts of the globe.
Ballard’s findings will be revealed in a two-part ABC News special “Back to the Beginning” on consecutive Fridays Dec. 21 and 28 at 9 p.m. Eastern. The special will retrace the Bible from Genesis to Jesus.
Geologists say the rising Mediterranean Sea would have pushed a channel through what is now the Bosporus Strait, submerging the shoreline of the Black Sea in waters rushing about 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls and covering 100,000 square miles.
As early as the 1990s, geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman gathered evidence of a flood in the Middle East region about 7,500 years ago, PBS has reported.
Ballard found evidence in 1999 of a submerged ancient shoreline and in 2011 found a sunken vessel and one of its crew members in the Black Sea, according to ABC. Ballard has enjoyed success as an underwater explorer, having found not only the Titanic but the battleship Bismarck and a U.S. fleet lost off the coast of Guadalcanal in the Pacific, according to news reports.
The Bible records Noah’s flood in Genesis 7-8.