nifest especially in 1997, when a credentialed Australian geologist, Ian Plimer, was ejected from a creationist lecture when ark explorer Allen Roberts refused to answer questions about geologic time. Plimer later sued Roberts for science fraud on the theory of "the dangers inherent in letting fundamentalists go unchallenged" (Scott 9). Plimer lost on the legal issue, which resulted in his bankruptcy, but won on substantive argument and PR grounds, reflected in a host of contributions to Plimer's legal fund.
The origin of widespread modern interest in the origins of Noah's flood, appears to have begun in the nineteenth century--and not because of the Book of Genesis. Asimov describes a British archaeological excavation in Nineveh in the 1860s that brought back cuneiform tablets to the British Museum. In 1872, a linguistics expert translated the tablets, the oldest literature record, which included the epic of Gilgamesh and "a flood story that the Biblical writers had obviously used as a source" (Asimov 405). Occurring in the context of the then-current Troy excavations, the discovery of Gilgamesh had a sensational aspect, and interest in making the Noah connection has persisted ever since.
Compelling geological evidence that a great flood may have involved lands of the eastern Mediterranean area about 5600 BC emerged in the 1990s when Russian and American scientists withdrew core samples from the Black Sea, "seeking signs of an ancient catastrophe they believed could have been the inspiration for ancient stories such as Noah's flood" (McInnis 46). The evidence of the core samples was that the vast Black Sea, originally a freshwater lake, had not formed over a long period but had been flooded by water from a northward-flowing Mediterranean Sea that came first through the Bosporus and then broke through the southern walls of the Black Sea basin with such force that the shoreline shortened at the rate of a mile a day, transforming th...