"I don't think the biblical deluge is just a fairy tale," Terence J Hughes, a retired University of Maine glaciologist living in South Dakota, told the New York Times.

"I think some kind of major flood happened all over the world, and it left an indelible imprint on the collective memory of mankind that got preserved in these stories."

n some ways, Hughes is a surprising figure to be quoted by the NYT.

A Newsweek article on him three years ago, credited Hughes with predicting the likely collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet as early as 1973.

But he is a contrarian, who doesn't consider climate change to be a great concern.

In fact, according to Newsweek he sees upsides including that carbon dioxide is good for plants, thawed permafrost could be farmed, and rebuilding coastal cities would create jobs.

The New York Times' interest in Hughes was as part of a series produced by a team visiting Antarctica.

His quote came in an article about the risks of ice sheets melting and coastal cities being inundated by rising seas.

According to the article the great flood of the Bible - and of other early literature - happened at the end of the last ice age.

Beginning 25,000 years ago ice sheets began to melt and the sea level started rising. Over thousands of years, coastlines receded by as much as 160km.

If the sea level rise from melting ice sheets under way now turned out to be as fast as the worst-case projections, "it could lead to a catastrophe without parallel in the history of civilisation," the Times said.

The impact of climate change on Antarctica is a key interest of New Zealand scientists, with the latest research to be presented at the New Zealand Antarctic Science Conference in Dunedin in late June. Continue reading

Source and Image

• Article by Michael Daly in Stuff

Was it biblical? Was it the least biblical Bible movie ever made?

These questions flare up in what is frankly a flat and over-rehearsed debate about the Bible in [Western] life.

Honestly, does it matter whether a movie is biblical? Do the spiritual-but-not-religious care?

Do those evangelicals who grow tired of the stereotype made of them in the media care? Do secular liberals who have no use for the Bible really care about these questions?

We can ask a better question, a more crucial and more meaningful question, "Why does The Flood continue to work as a powerful cultural story?"

Indeed, The Flood is one of the most ancient and oft recycled stories in world cultures.

In looking at The Flood today, we participate in thousands of years of meaning-making.

We connect ourselves to world literature, to ancient civilisations, and to a perennial story about a cataclysm that changed the world. Continue reading.

Source: Religion Dispatches

Image: Reading Cinemas

Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, said his evidence of the flood in Genesis comes from the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey.

He and his team were investigating a controversial theory, proposed by two Columbia University scientists, that the Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland — until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea.

Four hundred feet below the surface, the team unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea.

By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.

"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."

In the Netherlands, John Huibers spent three years building a replica of Noah's ark exactly as outlined in Genesis.

The vessel — 427 feet long, 95 feet wide and 75 feet high — now floats in the waters of Dordrecht, just south of Rotterdam, and is receiving up to 3000 visitors a day.

Inside, visitors can find a virtual petting zoo of a variety of domestic animals, including horses, sheep, dogs, rabbits and birds. In the absence of more dangerous animals, such as alligators and lions, or other creatures that Huibers was not able to obtain for the display, plastic models stand in their place.

Huibers says the ark serves a serious purpose. "We want to tell people about God," he says. "We wanted to build something that can help explain the Bible in real terms."

Sources:

ABC News

Christian Post

Christian News

Image: Brian Banmiller