My Theory Of A Great Flood In The Northern Sahara

[Silhouette]

What I know is that the north coast of Egypt with all the cities on it suddenly jumped down into the Mediterranean Sea in one earthquake in the 2nd century ad. Maybe something similar happened at the Atlas Mountains then it rose again.

Jumped down or ....the water filled up. I'm still thinking "Massive flood event".

 

[usmbguest5318]

No. I wasn't unclear in what i wrote, and any reader can tell that I did not say that....Well, that's not really so, for you clearly read my statement and suspect I have said something I did not.

OK. Sorry I misinterpreted it. But it did give me an opportunity to describe my background and interest in the topic (post 11).

The point is jump in. Don't disqualify yourself just because you're not an expert.

OK. Sorry I misinterpreted it.

Fair enough. Apology accepted.

FWIW, the overwhelming majority of what I write is fully understood via a "face value" interpretation of the words. Rarely am I with my remarks posted on USMB contrived, shy, sardonic or sarcastic. When I am thus, there'll be some clue -- an emoji, an "LOL," a graphic/meme, or supplementary remarks -- that inform the reader of my being so. Mostly, however, I say neither more nor less than what I mean and I tend to fairly comprehensively express the nuances of meaning in the themes upon which I expound.

Don't disqualify yourself just because you're not an expert.

My lack of expert status isn't why I'm refraining from remarking on the plausibility of your idea. That I'm not well informed enough to have even an inkling of your idea's actual plausibility is why I have no comment. The topic you've broached requires one to know a lot about several disciplines, along with knowing of geologic/tectonic, climatic and environmental events that occurred a very long time ago in the region (Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa), and I know I'm not well informed on enough of them to form a sound opinion of your idea's plausibility.

Sure, I can say "anything's possible, and that makes your idea plausible" but I suspect, given the effort you've put into sharing your ideas, you seek more substance than that. Out of respect for you in that regard, I'm not airing an opinion so puerile as that.

Can I ask somewhat intelligent questions about your idea? Sure.

• What are the time periods/layers associated with creation/existence of the rock formations that are visible today?
• When do you posit that the formations as we see them now were formed?
• How have you accounted for the possibility that the abrupt carving pattern we see is the result of millennia of wind-driven sand?
  • Have you considered what have been the direction and force of prevailing winds abrading the landscape for thousands of years?
  • Is there evidence of the smooth sort of abrasion that water produces, as contrasted with the sharp surfaces that wind-driven sand produces?
• As goes the tsunami aspect of your idea, have you sought and found evidence of such an event having occurred at the same point in history and affecting other coasts on the Mediterranean?
• Insofar as the plateau structures are a good ways inland, how do you propose that water persisted there and moved such that it abraded the land so as to form the plateaus we now see? After all, water must get into an area and be persistently present and sloshing against rock to carve it.
• How have you come to eliminate the possibility that the structural shapes we today observe are the not the result of the Tethys' motion during the Tortonian period?
  • Was the area under discussion for any other protracted period submerged and thus predominantly carved by water currents and, after the subsidence of the water, later subjected to wind/sand erosion, thereby creating the abruptness of which you wonder?
  • Are fossils of prehistoric water creatures there? Are enough fossils of water creatures found there to rule out the chance that a tsunamic flood didn't just deposit them there and there they died?
• Have you reviewed the scholarly work on the matter? If so, has someone already provided the answer to your question(s)? If so, how do your ideas align with and differ from them? If you have not performed a scholarly literature review, you should do so.
• Have you been to the area to look at the structures there?

Even as I can pose those questions, to what end would I do so as part of a discussion about the matter at hand? I'm certainly not going to pose questions I cannot answer and thereby challenge your notions for the sake of doing so. I haven't the training (formal nor self-directed yet rigorous) to have even the foggiest idea of what be legitimate answers to them. (Hell, I'm not altogether sure which, if any, of the questions I posed are materially germane to the matter and which, if any, are ancillarily so.) That I don't and know I don't, along with my unwillingness to invest the time and effort needed to obtain such information, is why it'd be irresponsible for me to remark upon the plausibility of your ideas.

To close, I offer a Rothbard quote that has application to pretty much any topic and that gives us a succinct explanation of why I don't have a comment on the plausibility of your ideas.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
-- Murray N. Rothbard​

Suffice to say, I'm well aware of the vast nature and extent of my ignorance on the matter you've broached. LOL

 

[usmbguest5318]

No. I wasn't unclear in what i wrote, and any reader can tell that I did not say that....Well, that's not really so, for you clearly read my statement and suspect I have said something I did not.

OK. Sorry I misinterpreted it. But it did give me an opportunity to describe my background and interest in the topic (post 11).

The point is jump in. Don't disqualify yourself just because you're not an expert.

OK. Sorry I misinterpreted it.

Fair enough. Apology accepted.

FWIW, the overwhelming majority of what I write is fully understood via a "face value" interpretation of the words. Rarely am I with my remarks posted on USMB contrived, shy, sardonic or sarcastic. When I am thus, there'll be some clue -- an emoji, an "LOL," a graphic/meme, or supplementary remarks -- that inform the reader of my being so. Mostly, however, I say neither more nor less than what I mean and I tend to fairly comprehensively express the nuances of meaning in the themes upon which I expound.

Don't disqualify yourself just because you're not an expert.

My lack of expert status isn't why I'm refraining from remarking on the plausibility of your idea. That I'm not well informed enough to have even an inkling of your idea's actual plausibility is why I have no comment. The topic you've broached requires one to know a lot about several disciplines, along with knowing of geologic/tectonic, climatic and environmental events that occurred a very long time ago in the region (Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa), and I know I'm not well informed on enough of them to form a sound opinion of your idea's plausibility.

Sure, I can say "anything's possible, and that makes your idea plausible" but I suspect, given the effort you've put into sharing your ideas, you seek more substance than that. Out of respect for you in that regard, I'm not airing an opinion so puerile as that.

Can I ask questions about your idea? Sure.

• What are the time periods/layers associated with creation/existence of the rock formations that are visible today?
• How have you accounted for the possibility that the abrupt carving pattern we see is the result of millennia of wind-driven sand?
  • Have you considered what have been the direction and force of prevailing winds abrading the landscape for thousands of years?
  • Is there evidence of the smooth sort of abrasion that water produces, as contrasted with the sharp surfaces that wind-driven sand produces?
• As goes the tsunami aspect of your idea, have you sought and found evidence of such an event having occurred at the same point in history and affecting other coasts on the Mediterranean?
• Insofar as the plateau structures are a good ways inland, how do you propose that water persisted there and moved such that it abraded the land so as to form the plateaus we now see? After all, water must get into an area and be persistently present and sloshing against rock to carve it.
• How have you come to eliminate the possibility that the structural shapes we today observe are the not the result of the Tethys' motion during the Tortonian period?
  • Was the area under discussion for any other protracted period submerged and thus predominantly carved by water currents and, after the subsidence of the water, later subjected to wind/sand erosion, thereby creating the abruptness of which you wonder?
  • Are fossils of prehistoric water creatures there? Are enough fossils of water creatures found there to rule out the chance that a tsunamic flood didn't just deposit them there and there they died?
• Have you reviewed the scholarly work on the matter? If so, has someone already provided the answer to your question(s)? If so, how do your ideas align with and differ from them? If you have not performed a scholarly literature review, you should do so.
• Have you been to the area to look at the structures there?

Even as I can pose those questions, to what end would I do so as part of a discussion about the matter at hand? I'm certainly not going to pose questions I cannot answer and thereby challenge your notions for the sake of doing so. I haven't the training (formal nor self-directed yet rigorous) to have even the foggiest idea of what be legitimate answers to them. That I don't and know I don't, along with my unwillingness to invest the time and effort needed to obtain such information, is why it'd be irresponsible for me to remark upon the plausibility of your ideas.

Rarely am I with my remarks posted on USMB contrived, shy, sardonic or sarcastic....I'm certainly not going to pose questions I cannot answer and thereby challenge your notions for the sake of doing so.

FWIW, I try to exercise a fairly rigorous degree of discursive and personal integrity. When I pose questions the reasons are fairly standard:

• Rhetorically, to make a point and be done --> It's relatively uncommon for me to use this rhetorical approach to making a point; it's too ambiguous a tactic for my taste, particularly when conversing with people whom I don't know well and personally and they me.
• Rhetorically to challenge an assertion someone has presented --> When I do this, I will most certainly answer the question I posed.
• To learn the answer --> I may or may not use the answer as part of a challenge to one's assertion(s), but the reason I ask is to discover the direct answer to it that the person asked gives.

 

[Silhouette]

Well I'm being an armchair theorist I admit. I don't have the resources to go do a dig high in the Atlas Range. The satellite photos and the cartographer's relief map of N. Africa is what caught my attention from a macro-scale. Getting right down to the micro scale in the dirt and doing carbon dating etc. will have to be someone else's work.

It's like when I was a child theorizing that the continents were once joined like a big puzzle. I was looking at it simply, innocently and obviously. And as it turns out my "silly" observations were spot on correct. It may be different this time. But again, I see a pattern of what looks like an enormously powerful wash of water came through that region, hit the transverse mountain range, shot backwards up into the Atlas Range through that trough I discussed and also did a backflow around Libya, Egypt and settled in a swamp around those areas and Norther Sudan. The outwash seems apparent after the transverse range was finally breached, via Mauritania. I hadn't even looked up the bathymetric map of the oceans yet but was not shocked when I did to see what looks like a large sediment shoal washed out there into the Atlantic. Other areas along the coast of West Africa show more or less of a clear dropoff/demarcation into the Atlantic. But not there. There seems to have been a large amount of sediment off Mauritania.

Then the only evidence of the upper Atlas plain, the Hauts Plateaux, seems to be one or two French studies. But even from them we find that the sediment layers are odd, difficult to explain as "uplifted marine" given they bury intact valleys and mountains near up to their peaks in fresher sediments. They called it a mega tectonic event or words to that effect. But beyond that, little information is available. No carbon dating at all that I know of. But there is the presence of small marine fossils in with the churned debris/sediment. Just very very odd to find burying a whole still-intact mountain/valley range up to its neck up there in the Atlas. For me that was the "smoking gun". That and that weird shoal off Mauritania.

 

[whitehall]

Most people who enjoy a summer day in NYC Central Park have no clue that the gouges in the rocks in the park were caused by a 100 foot glacier moving slowly across the entire North American continent and dragging sediment across New York. The point is that you have to get a handle on the Ice Age. Everything was different and elephants roamed across what would become the United States. When the Ice Age melted the oceans flooded the earth and probably the Sahara was a lake.

 

[Silhouette]

Most people who enjoy a summer day in NYC Central Park have no clue that the gouges in the rocks in the park were caused by a 100 foot glacier moving slowly across the entire North American continent and dragging sediment across New York. The point is that you have to get a handle on the Ice Age. Everything was different and elephants roamed across what would become the United States. When the Ice Age melted the oceans flooded the earth and probably the Sahara was a lake.

Well I can accept that. But I think the flooding of the Mediterranean at least once was massive and sudden for it to have pushed fill back way up to the top of the Atlas Range, sometimes filling old valleys up to mountain peaks. That's a LOT of fill. It boggles my mind. I've done some terracing with fill over the years and it takes yards and yards just to get one little area just a little bit higher on one side.

It could have happened during the last ice age. I'd like to see carbon dating on that fill up there. Very curious about that.

 

[alang1216]

Sounds rather far fetched to me. If it happened there would be evidence that I just don't see. There have been major flood events but nothing on the scale you propose. The flooding of the Mediterranean would be in that ballpark but that evidence is long gone.

 

[alang1216]

Most people who enjoy a summer day in NYC Central Park have no clue that the gouges in the rocks in the park were caused by a 100 foot glacier moving slowly across the entire North American continent and dragging sediment across New York. The point is that you have to get a handle on the Ice Age. Everything was different and elephants roamed across what would become the United States. When the Ice Age melted the oceans flooded the earth and probably the Sahara was a lake.

There have been major ice dam floods but there were no ice sheets near NW Africa.

 

[Unkotare]

This from the OP who insisted Tokyo would be evacuated within weeks.

 

[Silhouette]

Most people who enjoy a summer day in NYC Central Park have no clue that the gouges in the rocks in the park were caused by a 100 foot glacier moving slowly across the entire North American continent and dragging sediment across New York. The point is that you have to get a handle on the Ice Age. Everything was different and elephants roamed across what would become the United States. When the Ice Age melted the oceans flooded the earth and probably the Sahara was a lake.

There have been major ice dam floods but there were no ice sheets near NW Africa.

Well the ice sheet floods spill out into the ocean and from there the ocean does ? What? Stay inert?

 

[alang1216]

There have been major ice dam floods but there were no ice sheets near NW Africa.

Well the ice sheet floods spill out into the ocean and from there the ocean does ? What? Stay inert?

During the ice age sea level was well below what it is today. A tsunami back then would not reach the present day African coast, let alone make it inland.

 

[Silhouette]

Well you got me. And yet those deep sediments with little marine critters are still filling the Atlas Range's intact valleys up to its mountain peaks. Curious at that altitude.