God's Reset - Noah's Fight Against the Biblical Flood | Documentary

The story of the flood. The Bible tells it in frightening images. The windows of heaven open and then it rains constantly for 40 days and 40 nights. The ultimate catastrophe. Water from everywhere, from above, from below, covering the entire face of the earth. It is God's will to annihilate all life on earth. Except for one man who has been prepared because God ordered him to build a boat. It's Noah. The biblical flood. Too fantastical to be true? Is it only a legend? Or does it hold a kernel of historical truth? For decades now, scientists and scholars from all over the world have been looking for solid clues to confirm the story of a biblical catastrophe. The biblical flood is said to have lasted 40 days and 40 nights. Only Noah and his clan and two of every kind of animal made it onto the ark and are safe from the destructive waters. They are the only survivors of a natural disaster that destroys everything shortly after the world's creation. The first book of Moses depicts this chaos as God's punishment. Today, this passage in the Bible is interpreted as an account of a conflict. Creation myths and flood stories mostly talk about the tension between the human and the divine. These are two realms and the relationship between them has to be negotiated. According to the Bible, the relationship between God and God's creatures is broken. And it is God who then demonstrates his power over mankind. And he shows mercy only on Noah and his family. The story of the flood is one of the most famous myths in the Bible. The story is told in the first book of the Holy Scripture called Genesis or Creation. The book says that God created the earth in seven days. Then he decides to destroy it again. The book of books also supplies us with the reason for this. The world before the flood was filled with violence and man was corrupt in the eyes of God and full of sin and with a wicked heart. The creation, which is described as being very good at the end of Genesis, proved to be not so good after all. Violence and wickedness are not a good foundation for peaceful coexistence. And on account of the great frustration about this state of affairs, of this not so good creation, God sends the flood. Only Noah is allowed to bring himself and his family to safety in time. After the flood, he is said to become the progenitor of all future generations. He is described as a father of three sons who tilts the soil somewhere in the Holy Land, where exactly the Bible does not reveal. A clear picture of his character is given. He is said to be peaceful, understanding and God-fearing. Noah is a just man without blame. And so in the eyes of the Bible, he is perfect to set an example for everyone. Noah, my old friend, why are you so hard on yourself? It is my destiny. What do you waste your life on all of this nonsense for? Look around you, where do you think a flood could come from? It certainly will come. The Book of Genesis was mostly written in the 7th century BC in Jerusalem. So even if it has been changed, added to, amended later, the origin, the core of those texts situates us in that historical period. In the 7th century BC, Jerusalem is the capital of the Kingdom of Judah. For a long time, the scarcely populated land has been competing with the mighty Kingdom of Israel in the north. It once used to be united with. But around 640 BC, a king called Josiah comes to the throne and he has a vision to make Judah great again, basically. King Josiah's main objective is to reunite Israel with Judah. He goes down into history for enforcing a monotheistic faith with all his might. From 621 BC onwards, only God Java can be worshipped. And so you've got a god, Yahweh, who is not only the only god, he is the god of these people, the people of Israel. He is their god. And that is an incredibly powerful political tool because what you're now saying is that you are all one people under this one god, under this one king. And that starts to tell a story that is a national story. It starts to bring people together under a common identity. In this context, the story of Noah and his salvation appears in a completely different light. It shows what happens to those who still believe in other gods. They will perish in the flood. Here, the biblical ideas of sin, punishment and salvation finds its first climax in the story of the flood. And Noah, scholars see him as a leading character in the recently introduced Java cult. He's the hero in this chaotic biblical world, an invented character. But who or what does he stand for, other than being instrumental in demonstrating that the God of the Bible does more than just punish? That the story of the flood was written down in Jerusalem doesn't mean that it also happened in the region there. The Book of Genesis does not put the event in a specific place. The climate and landscape of the Holy Land rather speaks against a huge flood. Water has always been scarce here, not only in the mountain regions, but also in the valleys. The River Jordan has always been rather small and the threat of it drying up has been more likely than it bursting its banks. The idea for the story of the flood must have originated someplace else. The clues take us out of the Kingdom of Judah. The biblical world is much more expansive. It reaches from Egypt in the west to Mesopotamia in the east. The land between Euphrates and Tigris is home to strikingly many cities mentioned in the Old Testament, Babylon and Nineveh among them. The British Museum in London watches over a treasure that was discovered in the ruins of the city. Thousands cuneiform writing tablets, the famous Gilgamesh epic is among them, a copy from the 7th century before Christ. The Assyriologist Dr Irving Finkel is a renowned expert in this field. The epic of Gilgamesh was already translated more than 120 years ago by a certain George Smith. The gods choose one human being as a hero and this character had to build a boat in order to put life in it to withstand the waters so that afterwards everything could start all over again. I think he had a proper fit because of the shock of discovering a text which he knew from the Hebrew Bible by heart was suddenly there in front of him in this totally strange medium. The biblical flood story in the epic of Gilgamesh has its origins around 1600 BC and that means 1,000 years before the flood in the book of Genesis. This discovery shocks the world. The biblical version, a case of plagiarism? Today we know how the myth found its way into the Old Testament. Shortly after Josiah's death, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II invades the kingdom of Judah and the Judean elite are deported to Babylon basically so that they can't cause trouble back home in this newly conquered land. The writing of the book of Genesis continued then in Babylon. These Judean scholars carried on writing this sort of semi-sacred historical text but obviously they're now living within this alternative different culture and they are exposed to all the stories and the myths and the religious practices of this new land. And so that's probably where they hear the epic of Gilgamesh, where they hear the details of this ancient flood myth and a hero who survives the deluge. As the Judean scholars are writing this story, they refine it, they intentionally edit out certain sections like all the other gods, they've only got one god and they make it fit with the story that they want to tell. But that is not the end of it. An even older flood myth is deciphered. The epic of Atrahasis that dates back to 1800 before Christ and again, same story, different names. This is what the tablet looks like. Nothing exceptional until you start to read it. And I took one look at it and to my astonishment, I realized from the first lines only that this was another retelling of the flood story. So the Bible borrows from the Gilgamesh epic and the Gilgamesh epic borrows from the Atrahasis epic. And that is probably a written down version of a very ancient oral tradition that goes back even further. The thing that's really interesting though is all these literary leads take us to Mesopotamia. So that's where the search for the flood has to take you. The ziggurat of the city of Ur in today's Iraq, a flourishing center in the south of the country about 5,000 years ago. In 1929, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley believes to have happened upon traces of the biblical catastrophe. While unearthing the ruins, an almost three meter thick wall of mud is laid bare that dates back to the fourth millennium before Christ. But this conjecture remains just that, a theory. The sediments can be found only in Ur and its immediate surroundings. Comparable layers of mud in other cities belong to different time horizons. So therefore, all the floods are local events caused by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. But is a worldwide flood even possible? If you believe in the authors of the Bible, the water came from the sky and from the ground and is supposed to have reached the highest mountains. From a scientific point of view, this is inconceivable. If you were to distribute all the atmospheric water of the earth evenly on the surface of the earth, you'd only have a three centimeter thick layer. A global flood caused by rain is therefore unlikely. However, there is a huge reservoir of water in the earth's crust, locked in the mantle mineral ringwoodite. Estimates say that three times the water of all the world's seas could be stored there. But to unlock all this water from the earth's mantle and have it disappear back in there would truly require a divine miracle. From a scientific point of view, the biblical flood could not have happened. So now the challenge is working out where the origins of the myth come from. One lead takes us to a natural event that indeed has a global impact. The end of the last ice age, when vast areas of the northern hemisphere were still covered by glaciers. The extreme glacial period reached its peak about 21,000 years ago. The ice sheets hold huge amounts of water and that puts the sea level at about 120 meters below today's level. The world looks completely different back then. The North Sea is dry, Europe connected by land with Great Britain, North America linked to Asia via a land bridge. Large regions in Indonesia are contiguous with Malaysia. The earth's land mass is about 20 million square kilometers larger than today. That is an area of about six times the size of India. The main problem for humans is not only the cold, but the extremely dry weather as well. Since the Arctic ice sheets also bind water from the atmosphere, almost no rain falls. The soil is frozen solid and wherever the ice ends, one only finds vast stretches of barren land. The earth presents itself from its most hostile side. But there are also sanctuaries of a more moderate climate. One of them is the fertile alluvial wetlands on the Persian Gulf in today's Iraq. A green oasis even during the Ice Age. The region is covered with lakes, lagoons and swamps. The people on the Euphrates and Tigris have been living off the land and from fishing for thousands of years. Every generation carries on with the traditions of their fathers and forefathers. Their simple reed huts are reminiscent of accommodations from the Stone Age. Their archaic way of life gives us an idea of what the existence of a Persian Gulf farmer must have looked like many thousands of years ago. The Bible praises this region as a paradise as well. Quite possible that it was the inspiration for the Garden of Eden. Maybe Noah's world was the world of the settlers on the Persian Gulf? Is his story about the first farmers who realized that corn can be grown on the fertile soil? This is conceivable because this region represents a pivotal event in the story of mankind. These natural floodplains by the sea constitute the tip of the so-called Fertile Crescent, an area of 3,000 square kilometers between Iraq and southern Turkey, the oldest farmland on Earth. Around 11,000 years ago, a slow but steady change sets in. Hunters and gatherers settle down to farm the land and raise cattle. They begin to build houses and store supplies. The Fertile Crescent undergoes a transformation that will change the world forever. The Neolithic Revolution. This process is fueled by a global change in the climate and spells the end of the Ice Age. More sunlight, rising temperatures and the melting of the ice. A stable warm period is about to begin. More and more water evaporates. Rising into the atmosphere. This results in plentiful precipitation. Nature is recovering. The arid hinterland blossoms and ideal habitats develop everywhere. Beyond the fertile refuges as well. However, this climate change also brings forth existential problems. The ice sheets melt and water rushes across land areas into the oceans. The global consequence of this is a rising sea level. This also applies to the Persian Gulf with catastrophic results for the people in this region. An existential threat for them and their homes. Not again. It's time to go. The sea level of the Persian Gulf rises in several stages. From around 12,000 BC, the Arab Sea pushes only small amounts of water through the Strait of Hormuz. In the course of the next few thousand years, more and more salt water penetrates into the region. By around 4,000 BC, the land on the Persian Gulf has been flooded. The settlers there lose the land that feeds them. The biblical myth says Noah is told to build an ark to escape the great flood. The text provides precise dimensions. 300 times 50 times 30 cubits for the ark. That equals 130 times 20 times 13 meters. A gigantic seaworthy box, as the Bible says. The dimensions in the story are certainly a myth. Old oriental myths, which are so much older, already present the idea of an ark being some sort of temple for the surviving cosmos. And that means we are now entering the realm of the sacred. Archaeologists deal less with the meaning of the ark and more with its appearance. The Atrahasis epic provides some clues. The latest translation of the cuneiform tablet reveals spectacular findings. As you wade through this funny script, you cannot deny that this was the idea. It was a round boat. For most of us, this revelation requires us to basically kind of do a radical overhaul of the image that we have in our heads. But actually, if you think historically and archaeologically, it makes total sense. Because in Mesopotamia from that period, there was a great tradition of having very large round boats that were very sturdy, that you could transport people and animals and cargo in. So if you're telling a story about someone building a boat and surviving a flood, of course you'd describe the boats around you. That's the kind of boat a god would tell you to build. The early settlers on the Persian Gulf most likely used wicker boats, typical of this era. Suitable for shallow waters and light enough to carry on your back, but too small to weather a raging flood out on the open sea. But there's no need for that. The flooding of the farmland doesn't come as a surprise. It takes thousands of years for such a strip of land to become inhospitable, more than enough time to escape to dry land. It is more about the fear of the settlers to eventually lose their land for good. And in the end, the waters do not recede. Come, join us, my friend, please. I will stay here. The water is surely going to recede. Who knows, but you better not wait for that to happen. It is these kind of experiences that lead to a deeply rooted uncertainty. It can be rebuilt. Here there is no future, believe me. It is mankind's primal fear of being defeated by the elements that scientists and scholars see as the source of the deluge as it is related in the epics from Mesopotamia or the Bible. But the floods in the Persian Gulf do not rise to the levels of the biblical flood. But where else could an event like that have happened during the Great Melting Period? The search leads us to Europe, to the Black Sea. A landlocked sea that is fed by many rivers as well as saltwater from the Mediterranean. The Mararama Sea and the Bosporus connect both seas. Today, the Black Sea is filled with mostly saltwater. But that was not always the case. Thousands of years ago, it was a freshwater lake. The question of when and how the change from freshwater to saltwater came about encouraged two American scientists to put forward a hypothesis that raised many eyebrows. In the 1990s, Walter Pittman and William Ryan announced that the biblical flood happened at the Bosporus. According to their theory, the Black Sea is still separated from the Mediterranean around 7,500 BC. Its water level begins to rise due to the melting ice. The Black Sea, however, does not rise since it lies sealed off behind the Bosporus which acts like a dam. The difference between these two water levels increases over the centuries. Around 2,000 years later, it is at more than 100 meters. The danger these masses of water pose to the people living at the Black Sea have probably gone unnoticed by them. It is said that the region was similarly attractive as the oasis on the Persian Gulf. The mild climate makes the banks of this huge freshwater reservoir a very appealing place to settle. Research indicates that the first farmers who settled in Europe migrated from the region of the Fertile Crescent. The situation they find at the Black Sea must have seemed like a paradise. With fertile soil and virtually inexhaustible fishing grounds, they built their houses on piles to protect against possible floods. Could it be that Noah's story is an example of the typical experience of the early European farmers? This was considered very likely for a long time. And something else speaks for this theory. The proximity of the Mount Ararat to the Black Sea, the only specific place mentioned in the biblical flood story. This is where Noah's voyage in the Ark ends. Numerous expeditions set out to the peak of this snow-covered giant of a mountain to look for remnants of the Ark. But without success. Until a Turkish Air Force captain flies over Mount Ararat in 1960 and takes cartography pictures. One such shot shows the outline of a huge ship. The world held its breath. Many are hopeful that finally Noah's Ark has been found to prove the Bible's credibility. However, scientific investigations shatter that hope rather soon. The would-be Ark on Mount Ararat turns out to be a natural rock formation. According to another theory, the Ark might have really existed but much smaller than described in the Bible. The shape and size of the ship is said to match those of a pile dwelling. For millennia, a very common type of house at shore areas. The settlers might have repurposed the stilt buildings to riverboats. The only thing they had to do was to cut off the piles. With the rafts, the people of the Black Sea region would have been protected against a flood. Pitman and Ryan have developed a scenario that shows how the Mediterranean might have overflowed around 5,500 BC. The ever-mounting pressure of the rising water on the Bosporus leads to a break. And in one huge torrential wave, the first masses of water rush into the Black Sea initially through a narrow channel. But the unbridled power of the water widens this channel into a gigantic gorge. The masses of water which are supposed to have tumbled into the freshwater lake are 200 times more powerful than the Niagara Falls. A gigantic tsunami accompanied by deafening noise. As a consequence, so the theory goes, the Black Sea bursts its shores at lightning speed and sets the people there fleeing. Noah, we'll wait inside our houses till it's all over. We'll have to cut off the piles if we don't want to drown. Are you completely mad? It will not pass. We'll cut nothing off. We'll wait. The biblical flood on the Black Sea. The scientist's theory sounds perfect. But science requires evidence. And the proof of choice? Drilled core samples. The depths of the ocean are still largely unexplored. But the sediments on the ocean floor are rich in traces dating back to a very active past in the Earth's history. The core drillings are cut open on board and safely packed for later analysis at the lab. More than 154 kilometers of core samples are stored at the Center for Marine Environmental Science Marum. Millions of years in our planet's history carefully numbered and stacked in shelves. Among them also samples from the Black Sea. Dr. Karin Sonnefeld, marine biologist at the Marum in Bremen, Germany, has drawn some of them herself. What is so special about the core samples from the Black Sea is that we can clearly see the transition from the freshwater lake and the slow salinization that took place. We have the entire piece here that shows that. And that is very unique for the core. If you look across it, you can see many small layers, kind of like the pages in a book. When I have an orange layer, then I know it is an iron deposit. Here you can see a gray layer. Then it is simply clay. And then the black layers follow, and black means it's organic material. With this piece here, these deposits all happened when the Black Sea still held freshwater. And at some point you can see here that we have fewer black layers here, and it turns into a lighter gray. And that is the area where the Black Sea was slowly filling with saltwater and became more and more salty. However, to determine when and at what pace this salinization occurred Karin Sonnefeld searches for microfossils, and she finds them in these old layers. The drill cores extracted from the Black Sea show us, when we look at the sediments to find microfossils, we see only freshwater microfossils for a long time. And that means that at one point the entire Black Sea used to be a freshwater lake. But all of a sudden we see fossils of saltwater species, and that again means saltwater must have entered the lake. And you can see that this happened gradually, and the freshwater species become fewer. And you can see that the water slowly starts to turn salty. A slow-moving salinization does not support the idea of a biblical flood. However, it cannot be ruled out that the settlers faced hard times because of the ever-rising water level. You have to bear in mind that the Black Sea is like a bathtub with a very flat rim on its sides, and you can imagine saltwater flowing in through the bosporus. And more and more saltwater is added until it overflows the rim. And if that happens, the flat rim can overflow very rapidly. It's not that a gigantic flood wave entered the sea. It has been filled up very slowly, but you can imagine it happened rather quickly at the flat rims. Noah! I will save us all! The myth of Noah and the great flood may have a kernel of historic truth after all. It could be the story of traumatic events that happened to settlers on the Black Sea. But how do the ark and the animals fit into this picture that are such an integral part of the biblical story? To save two of every kind of animal, that's what God commands of Noah. For centuries, this has been taken literally and led to the idea that all animals of the world were allowed on board of the ark. But at some point, this stretches the limits of credibility. Even the largest ark under the sun could not house for all the animals. The Bible does not name specific animals. I mean, the Bible knows many animal names, but there are zero animal names in the flood story. Only groups, reptiles, domesticated animals and birds. Possible animals could be goats, cattle, donkeys and sheep, maybe even dogs. Among the birds, a raven and doves are mentioned. But when it comes to reptiles, it becomes hard to say what kind the Bible means. The animal passengers still remain somewhat of a mystery. A reader or listener of these stories might think that all animals they know were brought onto the ark. Otherwise, they wouldn't exist anymore. They would have drowned in the flood. So this ship is like a place of rescue into another time, another world. However, according to the Bible, only God's chosen are brought to safety. This place of rescue is meant only for Noah and his family and animals. All the others are left to their fate. It is said that the flood lasted for 40 days. There was torrential rain from above. Water came from the ground and surged from wells. Massive amounts of water from all directions. If people on the Black Sea were indeed affected by a disastrous flood, then maybe traces from settlements could be found there. The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project was able to provide some insight here. For three years, an international team of scientists explored the bottom of the Black Sea. Fitted out with the best cutting edge available underwater equipment, they descend into the deep. An underwater world full of mysteries. A dream not only for archaeologists. Starting at a depth of 150 meters, the heavily saline water is free of oxygen. This ensures that organic materials or wooden artifacts are perfectly conserved. The team can document a total of 67 wrecks stemming from various epochs, among them Greek and Roman merchant ships. The finds reveal that the Black Sea was a prosperous economic zone in ancient times. On the search for traces from the flood, the submerged coastal areas are being explored too. But the finds are much younger and do not fit the flood theory. What the scientists do find out, however, is that the process where the Black Sea turns from a freshwater sea to a salty sea starts much earlier as suggested by Pittman and Ryan. Clues that support these findings have been discovered by scientists in the north of Turkey, in the Sophula Stalicyte Cave, only 20 minutes from the sea. For many years, Dr. Dominic Flightman from Basel University and his team have been doing research there. The paleoclimatologists used the cave as a natural climate archive to reconstruct extraordinary climate events in the various geological eras of the Earth. The Sophula Cave is a particularly rich source for this undertaking. Good, let's go into the cave. A journey back into the past of climate history. The stalagmites are a relatively recent climate archive. 20 years ago, we began to see them as a source of information on climate changes in the past. The paleoclimatologists have already been able to prove that stalagmites can provide information that is as accurate as that from the ice core samples extracted in Greenland or Antarctica. Cave exploration has its dangers. On its search for suitable samples, the team has to find a safe path through the darkness. Rappelling down the craggy cave walls requires a high degree of experience, concentration and physical fitness. The Sophula Cave is not an easy cave. It is not horizontal, meaning we have to go down vertical shafts and sometimes even crawl forward in certain places. That means the cave doesn't give up its samples that easily, so we have to put some effort in it. But it's worth it, since the samples are of wonderful quality. Very long stalagmites that reach far back in time, easy to extract samples from, in wonderful shapes with continuous growth. Exactly what we need for our climate archive. Stalagmites are petrified water. They grow only very slowly in length. They consist of many millions of raindrops that trickle down from the surface through the rocks. Every drop leaves calcium behind. And the special characteristic of calcium is that it works like a data storage system with climate information from the last 700,000 years. Well, we use the stalagmites to get a rather accurate picture of the climate fluctuations and the environmental conditions 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 years ago. With the help of our analyses, we can precisely determine how much temperatures have fluctuated in the past, how much precipitation happened above the cave or even what kind of vegetation could be found above the cave. And the flora, of course, depends on the climate conditions. We can glean all this information from the relatively small stalagmite. The rather bizarre calcium columns are of premium value for the scientist. To find out what really happened thousands of years ago on the Black Sea, they only need one more suitable sample. Size and age must fit. So many beautiful stalagmites. Yes, nice sample here. Good stalagmite, right size. Beautifully straight, which indicates a constant drip rate. And this one could well be 400,000 years old. Exactly what we're looking for. Back in Basel, they cut the find open. The oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratio in water and calcium allows the experts to make exact determinations about the weather situation on the Black Sea. Also stored in the stalagmite is the water that evaporated above the Black Sea and came down as rain 5,500 years before Christ. The question is if the inland sea was flooded by a deluge, as Pittman and Ryan claim, or not. Was there much or only little precipitation back then? To determine the amount of rain, the stalagmite is cut into small pieces and then based on its annual rings carefully sorted by centuries and millennia. The team chooses the time horizon of 7,500 BC and sets it clearly before Pittman and Ryan's dating. The sample is put under enormous pressure in the mass spectrometer to squeeze all water from the stalagmite. The signal should be here any minute. So here we go. It is going up. We've rarely had so much water. The data reveals the Black Sea had already reached its present size 9,500 years ago. And another spectacular finding comes of this test. Our data from the stalagmites, but also other geological data, clearly show that there had been an outflow of water from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and not the other way around. So that disastrous event never happened in that manner. It's the melting water from the glaciers carried down by the big rivers that is responsible for the expansion of the Black Sea, a process that probably starts as early as 15,000 BC. The sea level rises until the water starts to flow over into the Mararama Sea. And when thousands of years later the Mediterranean also rises, the two seas begin to mix. This process took a long time. The Black Sea turning entirely into this brackish sea we know today. You have to remember, the Black Sea is a huge body of water and we only have one inflow through the relatively narrow Bosporus. It's as if you want to fill up your swimming pool using a garden hose. It takes a long time. And this is what you have to visualize, that this process took more than 2,000 to 3,000 years before this huge amount of water had been completely exchanged. This is the scientific death knell for the Pitman-Ryan theory that posits that the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus and rushed into the Black Sea. One thing is certain, the great ice melting pushes the global sea level up by 120 meters. Floods are quite normal. The melting water separates Europe from Africa. Japan becomes an island and so does Indonesia and Australia. North America is cut off from Asia. The earth is changing its face. And Noah, who does he symbolize? The only pious man in all the kingdom of Judah? Or the early settler in Mesopotamia who has to struggle with the permanent floods from the Euphrates and Tigris? Or the farmers on the Persian Gulf who must abandon their habitats on account of a rise in the sea level? Or is he one of the settlers on the Black Sea who might have never experienced a biblical flood but still have to leave their homes because the sea has swallowed entire stretches of shore to never give them back? And what about the Ark? Is it a holy temple, a huge ship or a houseboat? Maybe it is not important who Noah actually was or where he lived, how big the Ark was and which animals he saved. Noah represents the sum of all human experience with the indomitable power of water and for the multitude of traumatized people of ancient times that lost their homes. All this is channeled into the biblical story of Noah and the flood. We have evidence of over 500 flood myths from different cultures across time and across geographies. It's something that just comes up again and again in human culture. And I think that's because flood myths speak to a deep human experience that is shared. We all understand the power of water, how it is necessary to give life but how easily it can destroy life as well. And I think the story of a flood speaks of birth and rebirth, of destruction and recreation. In the biblical myth, Jave has the flood recede and begins creation again. However, this new world will not become a more peaceful one. God adapts to man's needs. He eventually realizes humans don't change or creation doesn't change. And if you start from there, it is actually God that changes. It is a learning curve God has to climb here. And that makes the story of the flood not a story of a disaster but of hope. Because you have to add that at the end of the story, God says, I will never again bring another global catastrophe of that magnitude upon the world. At the end, God puts a rainbow in the sky. It symbolizes his promise to never again send such a devastating cataclysmic flood. However, by the looks of it, humanity faces another new catastrophe. The climate is going haywire around the globe. The ecosystem is at a tipping point and about to collapse. Global warming is advancing relentlessly. And of course, it doesn't stop short at the vast amounts of water still packed in the ice. In particular, since global temperatures have jumped upward for the last few decades. Scientists have calculated what will happen if the polar ice melts completely. The sea level will rise another 65 meters. There have always been climate changes in the past. We have had ice ages and warm periods. That's what our samples and the stalagmite data tell us. But we have never had a period in which the climate has changed so abruptly. And above all, we can see a change that we didn't expect to come from natural climate fluctuations. What we really would expect is some cooling. And what we see now is exactly the opposite. And that means our data clearly proves that today's climate change is man-made. A major global ice melt would have much more dire consequences in today's 21st century than in the distant past. Mega floods would simply roll over coastal areas and river regions. Millions and millions of people would be forced to leave their villages and cities. Unless, of course, humanity stops this process. So we won't have to tell another story of a biblical flood.