What are Some Prehistoric Deluges?
Most people are familiar with the story of the Great Flood, or Deluge, in the Bible. What is less well-known is that there actually were deluges in the past, prehistoric deluges, mostly as a consequence of rising sea levels due to the melting of the ice at the end of the last Ice Age, for an extended period between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago. These may have inspired flood myths. During the last Ice Age, northern Eurasia and North America were covered in thick glaciers, rendered uninhabitable. As a sort of tradeoff, large areas of land now underwater were once dry, because so much of the world’s water was locked up in ice caps. This includes Doggerland, the area of the North Sea between the UK and the Netherlands; Beringia, which early man crossed to gain access to the Americas; Sundaland, a tropical region in present-day Indonesia, and many others. As the ice melted, sea levels rose, and inundated the land. Usually this process was too slow to notice, occurring over hundreds or thousan
