Flood Made Britain An Island 'In 24 Hours'

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 9-25-2006 | Tim Hall

[blam]

Flood made Britain into an island 'in 24 hours'

By Tim Hall

(Filed: 25/09/2006)

Britain may have become an island after a Biblical-style flood split it from Europe in less than 24 hours, according to new geological research.

The flood would have taken place between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, sweeping away hills between Britain and what is now France.

The theory could rewrite British prehistory, as current text-books teach that Britain - once a peninsula of continental Europe - split from the great land mass after a long process of erosion and rises in sea levels.

However, surveys of the Channel bed using new sonar techniques have revealed the remains of a huge valley, running south-west from the Strait of Dover.

The sonar survey, led by Sanjeev Gupta, from Imperial College, London, uncovered deep bowls, scour marks and piles of rubble on the sea bed that may have been caused by a torrent of water.

Dr Gupta said in a paper published at an academic conference: "In places, this valley is more than seven miles wide and 170 ft deep, with vertical sides. Its nearest geological parallels are found not on Earth but in the monumental flood terrains of the planet Mars.

"This suggests the valley was created by a catastrophic flood following the breaching of the Dover Strait and the sudden release of water from a giant lake to the north."

According to Dr Gupta's theory, France and Britain would have been linked by a high ridge of chalk hills, running roughly between Dover and Calais. To the north would have been a freshwater lake, fed by rivers, and deepened over thousands of years.

The lake, hundreds of feet above sea level, finally overflowed the chalk ridge and swept down towards the Atlantic. The water washed away the soft chalk hills and left the British Isles a separate land mass.

Dr Gupta's work is outlined in his book Homo Britannicus: the Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain, to be published next week.

[TX Bluebonnet]

Maybe Velikovsky was right after all!

[UglyinLA]

The flood would have taken place between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago..and rises in sea levels.

Those poor Neaderthals.. if they only had known about global warming, they could've taken action...

[thomaswest]

You are mistaken. There was this ancient text, y'see, and there was a talking snake. But people managed to survive. And then there was a flood. Most people and animals and plants did not survive, although some claim that all the animals and plants survived. However, no innocent human unborns and toddlers survived (this is said to encourage morality). But then there was a miracle or two.

Then there was the notion that earth was not the center of the Universe. The godly types objected--just as they promoted the previous drownings of innocents.

In understanding how human language developed, there is insufficient attention as to how a snake could gain this ability. This is a gap in evolutionary biology.

[CobaltBlue]

The reason why nobody believes your theory is that the timelines for differnt floods simply will not match up, period.

They're many thousands of years apart, in some cases hundreds of thousands of years.

For example, the hypothesis in this article is that the channel between England and France was cut 200 million to 400 million years ago.

Unfortunately for you, the Grand Canyon is only 5 to 6 million years old.

I mean, if the Old Testament said that God sent a volcano to chastise mankind, would you be massaging volcano sites all over the world, trying to make their timelines line up?

[Knitting A Conundrum]

One just has to look at places out in the American Northwest to see what sudden water breakthroughs can do...Like when Lake Bonneville and Lake Missoula both changed the landscape...

http://www.glaciallakemissoula.org/virtualtour/index.html

http://geoinfo.geosc.uh.edu/VR/idaho/index.htm

[spinestein]

[IMO, this is why some contemporary science gets such a bad reputation. You state an estimate range going back perhaps as much as 500,000 years. But not 600,000? Not 700,000? No, no, but 500,000 is a definite possibility (more recent is more likely, of course, but the range of informed estimates goes back as much as 500,000 years). ... You're guessing, conjecturring, and supposing. And you're calling it science.]



It's a necessary part of the scientific process to give quantitative estimates within a range and specify likely error with a percentage. You would have been wise to educate yourself about how science is practiced before you attempted to ridicule others.

[balch3]

Only surprising if you don't believe in Biblical Creation.

[dalereed]

They just wanted to rid themselves of France so bad that they gave everyone oars and said row your hearts out!

[RobbyS]

Gradualism took such a strong hold in Darwin because it was so congruent with Whig political history. If the theory of evolution still stands in 100 years, it probably will be as different from Darwin's as Ptolemy's view of the cosmos is from that of the Hubble telescope.

[spinestein]

LOL! Good one!

[Fred Nerks]

"...The Atlantic Ocean sent its waters along the Scottish and Norwegian shores, and also through the Channel that had been formed only a short while before. Human artifacts and bones of land animals were dredged from the bottom of the North Sea; and along the shores of Scotland and England, as well as on the Dogger Bank in the middle of the sea, stumps of trees with their roots still in the ground were found. Forty-five miles from the coast, from a depth of thirty-six metres, Norfolk fishermen drew up a spearhead carved from the antler of a deer, embedded in a block of peat. This artifact dates from the Mesolithic or early Neolithic Age and serves as one of many proofs that the area covered by the North Sea was a place of human habitation not many thousands of years ago. From the analysys of the pollens found in the peat taken from the bottom of the sea, the conclusion was reached that thse forests existed in not too remote times. It has also been assumed that the building of large areas of the North Sea in the Subboreal period resulted from a rather sudden sinking of the land, which some authorities date at about 1500 B.C."

Source: Earth In Upheaval. by Immanuel Velikovsky.

[spinestein]

[I agree with you that it is impossible to know how language started, but it seems to me understandable in terms of development of brain capacity...]



A small part of our brain known as Broca's area is 100% necessary for language and the study of it's evolutionary development is understandably a matter of interest to anthropologists. Other primates have similar but much less well developed areas in their brains which are responsible for complex communication between individuals.

[SunkenCiv]

The Sinking Lands, which lay to the west of Britain (between Britain and Ireland) are mentioned in the Mabinogeon; the stumps of apparently suddenly submerged forests have been found off Wales. Also, most are familiar with Lyonnesse. Winnie Churchill's history of, hmm, Britain mentions the submerged forests and whatnot and that the North Sea floor was once dry land. (':

And much smaller events of this kind have taken place historically, here and there:

Clare Places: Islands: Mutton Island or Enniskerry (9th century catastrophe in Ireland)
Clare County Library | prior to November 19, 2005 | staff writer
Posted on 11/18/2005 2:58:58 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1524751/posts

[snip]

According to the "Annals of the Four Masters" the island was once called Fitha Island and it formed part of the mainland until the day "the sea swelled so high that it burst its boundaries, overflowing a large tract of country, and drowning over 1,000 persons." This happened on March 16th, 804. Some reports describe it as an earthquake, others as a tidal wave when "the sea divided the island of Fitha into three parts." These three islands are Mutton Island, Inismattle (or Illanwattle) and Roanshee (or Carrig na Ron). There is a fourth island in the area called Carraig Aolacan.

[unsnip]

[dr_lew]

The Grand Canyon follows a meandering course and has a dendritic ( tree-like ) system of tributary canyons. It was clearly formed by a gradual erosion process.

Compare and contrast the "braided stream" appearance of the Spokane Scablands, caused by the scouring action of a catastrophic flood.

[GOPJ]

Didn't a similar thing happen here?

[wyattearp]

Ummmm...because it makes sense?

Only if you don't read topographical maps. The rim of the Grand Canyon is the highest point in the area, by thousands of feet. For the canyon to be cut by a catastrophic flood, the water would have had to flow uphill for thousands of feet in elevation. Water doesn't do that. It doesn't go for the highest point, it goes for the lowest.

If a huge amount of water would have suddenly been flowing in the area, and the topography were the same then as it is today, with the exception that the Grand Canyon did not exist, the water would have flown around what would have been a small mountain, not over it.

The only explanation that "makes sense" is that the land in the area was gradually being upthrust, as the water flowed through it. Water flow, upthrust, and erosion were at an equilibrium, to some extent. That the Canyon wanders rather significantly is indicitave of the different materials present, in that some materials erode in water faster than others. If the channel was always the lowest point, the water would have stayed in the channel. Otherwise, it would have gone around.

[Fred Nerks]

GRAND CANYON

MARS

http://www.holoscience.com/views/view_mars.htm

[carumba]

Yes, that is correct. There was another inland sea in south east Utah.

[Straight Vermonter]

As others have pointed out the Grand Canyon has the traits of an erosion valley. The western badlands, however, seem to have been formed by a catastrophic flood or floods. Check it out here (PDF).

[Straight Vermonter]

Play nice. There are some good people here.