Comet or Meteor Impact Around the Time of the Flood?

Landsat Data Used in Chevron Discovery
Contributor: USGS (The Landsat Project Update)
Posted: Feb. 20, 2007
The chevrons are found within the red circles on this Landsat 7 image.

Recently a landform called a chevron was noted on a Landsat 7 image of Madagascar. These chevrons may have been formed by a mega-tsunami produced 4,800 years ago by a meteorite or comet impact with the Indian Ocean. I have included a close up Google Earth photo of the chevron on the left in the Landsat photo. madagascar_chevron.jpg You can type in the coordinates in Google Earth and go there yourself and investigate.

Discover Magazine (2007)article on this topic … “Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?

New York Times (2006) article on this topic … “Ancient Crash, Epic Waves

This is very interesting to me because I have noted for some time how the work of Henry Morris and other neo-catastrophists has had the effect of pushing mainstream geologists ever closer to reconsidering the Global Flood as a starting point for all inquiries in historical geology.

It is also interesting because of my interest in Dr. Walter Brown’s Hydroplate Theory which postulates a catastrophic bursting open of the Fountains of the Deep. Brown says that comets and asteroids were launched during this time. Did some of them “return home” shortly after or during the Flood?

It is also interesting that Sir Charles Piazzi Smyth, one time Astronomer Royal for Scotland dated the Flood at 2743 BC based on data from the Great Pyramid of Gizeh and upon ancient literature surveys. This is very close to Bruce Masse’s date for this postulated comet/meteor impact of May 10, 2807 B.C. (See Discover Mag article above) Piazzi Smyth made very detailed measurements of the Great Pyramid and concluded that it was built by people with highly advanced scientific knowledge. The great Egyptologist Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie was fascinated with Smyth’s work and made his own investigation. He concluded that one of Smyth’s key measurements was wrong, but Smyth was later vindicated and shown to be in agreement with Petrie’s measurements. See my discussion of this topic with Dean Anderson, a former administrator at IIDB HERE.

And finally, a recent Science (2005) article on … “Tracking Myth to Geological Reality” which notes that …

More and more geoscientists are willing to combine their work with such stories these days, in a budding discipline called geomythology. Volcanologist Floyd McCoy of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, says discussing myth has traditionally been “a good way to sink your own credibility”; it can put you on the list with flaky Atlantologists and other amateur zealots. But, says McCoy, “I’d be a fool to write it all off. There is a new realization that some myths have something to say.” Myths can sometimes alert researchers to previously unheeded geohazards; in other cases, where science has demonstrated the danger, legends “enrich the record” and reinforce the fact that people lie in harm’s way, says paleoseismologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Seattle, who has spearheaded many studies of seismic events in the Pacific Northwest. The trick is teasing out which myths carry kernels of truth that can be connected to hard data.Deities of flood and fire

The movement traces in part to the 1980s, when scientists realized that the slow march of geologic time is sometimes punctuated by biblical-scale catastrophes, such as the giant meteorite that wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. After this was accepted, some (usually those with tenure) felt freer to wonder if near-universal myths of great floods and fires implied that such disasters also have punctuated human time. In the 1990s, Columbia University marine geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan argued that rising Mediterranean sea levels following the last deglaciation topped what is now the Bosporus Strait and roared into the Black Sea 7600 years ago, serving as the original inspiration for the biblical flood. Their work triggered sharp criticism and a torrent of research, resulting in growing acceptance of some sort of Black Sea flooding (Science, 22 September 2000, p. 2021). Whether the book of Genesis somehow grew from this is a further step, admits Ryan, who presented his latest findings at the International Geoscience Program in Istanbul, Turkey, in early October.

3 Responses to “Comet or Meteor Impact Around the Time of the Flood?”

  1. lordkalvan says:

    I wonder how you can be confident in the date attributed to this possible impact? Obviously there is no written evidence of the event. Equally this can be said of the flooding of the Black Sea. What mechanisms are used to date these events? Radiometric dating, I presume? The one fits well with a YEC chronology, the other less so. if one is considered ‘reliable’ and supporting the chronology (Madagascar impact event) and the other not (Black Sea flooding), what grounds are used for rejecting one dating attribution and not the other?

    As a side comment, I should point out that Piazzi Smyth was but one of many scholars who were keen to calculate the date of the Flood (there were at least 140+ other estimates for the date at the time) and his date for the Flood should be approached with caution and a healthy amount of scepticism. What, for example, were the reasons he had for selecting the sources he used (indeed, what were the sources?) and what was his methodology for deriving such a precise date from his analysis? He also had pre-existing beliefs in respect of Khufu’s Pyramid and was quite prepared to alter his calculations to agree with his own and other’s (petrie, for example) data; indeed, it appears quite evident that he was prepared to fudge (consciously or unconciously) the data to comply with those pre-existing beliefs..

  2. lordkalvan says:

    A further comment on Smyth: you refer to his belief that Khufu’s Pyramid was constructed by ‘people with advanced scientific knowledge’. This is a very non-specific observation. It is self-evident that Khufu’s Pyramid is the work of a culturally, economically and technologically sophisticated people, but it sits comfortably in its historical context as a natural development of the tomb-building practices of the predynastic and early dynastic (1st through 4th Dynasties) Egyptians. Are you suggesting that Smyth thought the Egyptians were in fact not responsible for Khufu’s Pyramid? If this is so, it seems idiosyncratic – to say the least – that you would value Smyth’s opinion more highly than that of professional Egyptologists who have closely studied their subject during the 150 years since Smyth’s work. And Smyth was, when all is said and done, an astronomer with no academic background in Egyptology at all; many of his conclusions were at considerable variance with the understanding of contemporary Egyptologists.

  3. lordkalvan says:

    I am still interested in understanding how you can be confident in the date that you reference in the following statement?

    ‘These chevrons may have been formed by a mega-tsunami produced 4,800 years ago by a meteorite or comet impact with the Indian Ocean.’

    As far as I am aware Piazzi Smyth’s flood date was not derived scientifically, yet presumably the meteor/comet impact date was? How do you suppose the latter date was derived? If you believe it to be reasonably accurate (which you must do if you regard it as supporting Smyth’s date in some way), why do you think that other similarly derived dates that suggest YE creationism is seriously at fault in its perception of the age of Earth and the Universe are wrong? Is your reasoning entirely circular, for at this point iy seems so?