For those who may be interested, a map at this link shows the location of the alleged crater: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/564185/posts
And the entire London Telegraph article, complete with a picture of the alleged "meteor crater" may be seen here: http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F11%2F04%2Fwmet04.xml
Some interesting excerpts:
The draining of the region, as part of Saddam's campaign against the Marsh Arabs, has since caused the lake to recede, revealing a ring-like ridge inside the larger bowl-like depression - a classic feature of meteor impact craters.
The crater also appears to be, in geological terms, very recent. Dr Master said: "The sediments in this region are very young, so whatever caused the crater-like structure, it must have happened within the past 6,000 years."
Reporting his finding in the latest issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Dr Master suggests that a recent meteor impact is the most plausible explanation for the structure.
A survey of the crater itself could reveal tell-tale melted rock. "If we could find fragments of impact glass, we could date them using radioactive dating techniques," he said.
A date of around 2300 BC for the impact may also cast new light on the legend of Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of "the Seven Judges of Hell", who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day into night, "smashed the land like a cup", and flooded the area.
Alan,
First off, thanks for the links. Next, thanks for all your feedback. I always enjoy reading your comments. I'll try to respond to some of what you had to say, though my time is pretty short today.
You wrote: By setting forth the material that COJ posted last year alongside the material from your linked "meteor theory" website and other stories, you've set forth two mutually exclusive and contradictory hypotheses. COJ's material points out evidence that a massive flood drowned the entire southern end of Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C. (actually the evidence for this is rather poor), whereas your material here claims that different evidence indicates 2350 B.C. and entirely different causes.
I disagree. I have discussed this subject matter with COJ at length and he has said that the 3500 B.C. dating was extremely tenuous. Thus I believe the evidence which points to a massive flood drowning the entire southern end of Mesopotamia at about that time may have been deposited in the year 2350 B.C., the date tree ring studies indicate a major environmental disturbance occurred. Besides, Carl has, as far as I am aware, never addressed the possible cause of Noah's flood, other than to say it included a major inundation from the Persian Gulf. I believe a meteor impact having the force of "hundreds of hydrogen bombs," as has been said of an impact large enough to create a crater the size of the one discovered in southern Iraq, may well have caused such an inundation. How? I believe the Epic of Gilgamesh may provide the answer. It tells us that at the time of the flood, "One whole day the tempest raged, gathering fury as it went, it poured over the people like the tides of battle." This certainly seems to me like a reference to a series of tidal waves which such an impact may well have triggered. However, if Noah lived far enough inland from the Gulf he would not have been hit by the force of those waves but his land may still have been drowned by the water they contained.
I have asked Carl to add to this discussion if he has the time and anything else that he feels may be of interest to say on the subject.
You wrote: Another problem is containing the Flood waters. Suppose that part of your scenario is right, and that the trough between the Arabian peninsula and Zagros mountains in which the Tigris-Euphrates valley sits somehow got filled with enough water to be Noah's Flood. Just how would the water keep from running southeast right down the river valley and into the Persian Gulf?
Could a meteor impact with the force of hundreds of hydrogen bombs have caused the land of Noah, or for that matter all of southern Iraq, to temporarily sink? It would not have had to sink much. For, as you remind us, "Baghdad is [now] only 34 meters above sea level." Then after several months, as the land began to rise, could the rising land have drained its flood waters into the Persian Gulf, from which most of them came?
You wrote: Those great lights John Whitcomb and Henry Morris pointed out in their 1961 book The Genesis Flood that the so-called Bible chronology actually has a lot of slop in it. There is no way to tell, for example, if the various "begats" referred exclusively to a father-son relationship.
I have studied this subject matter at length and have read Morris and Whitcomb's comments. I disagree with them for several reasons which I do not now have time to discuss. (I have also thoroughly studied all other areas of Bible chronology, including the period of time from the division of the kingdom following the death of Solomon until the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., and am convinced that Bible chronology points to 2350 B.C. as the date of Noah's flood.) Morris and Whitcomb were trying their best to poke holes in a Bible chronology which dates Noah's flood quite recently. They were obviously doing so to prevent their ridiculous contentions from seeming even more ridiculous. By Morris and Whitcomb postulating gaps in the Genesis genealogies they allowed for the possibility that the Genesis flood took place several thousand years earlier than the here discussed 2350 B.C date. However, Morris and Whicomb failed to realize that adding of a few thousand years to the traditional B.C. date for Noah's flood does nothing to make their contentions that that flood was a global one any more credible.
Alan, I agree with you that this is all, at this point, pretty much speculation fueled by a desire to lend some support to the Genesis flood account. But it certainly seems to me that the belief of many Christians, that the flood described in Genesis was an actual historical event, is now not nearly as unfounded by extrabiblical evidence as it once was. For Bible believers now have tree ring dating of a catastrophic climate change exactly coinciding with what has long been held to be the Bible's own date for the flood. We now can connect the flood account contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which seems to point to a meteor impact or a series of such impacts as the cause of the flood, with the discovery of what appears to be a fairly recent meteor impact crater in southern Iraq. And we also have the evidence of extensive flooding in the same area, which may possibly have been deposited at the same time, which COJ has discussed at length in the past.
I wouldn't dismiss all of this too quickly if I were you. If you do, you might just have to post a retraction in the not too distant future. : )
