The ocean levels worldwide dropped, with a variance of some hundreds of feet, depending on the latitude. Gibraltar strait depth exceeds a half mile in spots, far too much to have the Med go dry. But there are caves offshore from the modern riviera, and during the glaciation they were dry, occupied by humans (at least intermittently). And the Black Sea and Aegean lost their connection for thousands of years, with the Black Sea level alternating higher than today (and fresh or fresher) and ultimately lower.
Greek historian Diodorus Siculus reports about Samothrace Island, North of Aegean Sea (Biblioteca Historica, Book 5, Chapter 47, 4):
"The inhabitants who had been caught by the Flood ran up to the higher regions of the island. And when the sea kept rising higher and higher, they prayed to the native gods, and since their lives were spared, to commemorate their rescue they set up boundary stones around the entire circuit of the island and dedicated altars upon which they offer sacrifices even to the present day." [link, may be dead]
The melting of the glaciers took place supposedly over centuries, but evidence says otherwise. The failure of the Black Sea to fill at a similar pace to the world's oceans is illogical under assumptions of uniformity, since the Black Sea would be filling up with glacial meltwater at the same time as the rest of the world's seas, and arguably should have been doing so at a faster pace.
The story from Diodorus involves a then-extant local tradition on Samothrace in the Aegean that the flooding of the peninsula (the island seen today was indeed a peninsula during relatively recent human times) resulted from an outflow from the Black Sea, and that Diodorus was shown the still-visible remains of the submerged structures of the earlier town. Ryan and Pitman attribute the first detail to an implausible scenario:
- the ancestors of the inhabitants of that island had lived on an unidentified peninsula in the Black Sea, now submerged
- moved at the time of the flood to an island in the Aegean, an unknown number of miles, accomplished on foot as the flood made navigation into the Aegean impossible
- retained the story for 7000 years
- reversed the direction of the flow in order to make sense of it
- pointed to the submerged structures, which must be coincidence
- another people built the submerged structures many centuries before the Aegean _gradually_ rose and flooded the Black Sea, or
- that the structures, whatever they were, were natural and in any case may still exist
If natural, the submerged structures would be serendipitous or even the origin of the story. If they led to the Samothracians either making up the story of the flood, or distorting some account of the actual Black Sea flood, it would be an amazing coincidence. This would however make the rest of Ryan and Pitman's supposed explanation incredible, if an 8000 year old tradition to explain apparently submerged structures is not already incredible.