NEWS re Black Sea Flood

[Sean Crist]

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
> rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
> time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
> then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
> which is in just this position.

Your question makes sense, and I don't know the answer to it.  I just
checked a map of the Pleistocene glaciation, and it didn't get nearly far
enough south to cover the Black Sea area, or I would have thought that to
be the explanation.

Whatever the explanation, we know that the fish, etc. in the earlier Black
Sea were freshwater type creatures.  At the time of the flood in question,
there is an abrupt and wholesale change in the life-forms in the Black Sea
to salt-water species from the Mediterranean.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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