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Danube Delta Cores

Did a flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out nearby Neolithic settlements? “We don’t see evidence for a catastrophic flood as others have described,” says geologist Liviu Giosan, shown here analyzing a sediment core sample in WHOI’s McLean lab. Giosan and his colleagues used cores from the delta of the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea, to reconstruct sea level for the Black Sea as far back as 10,000 years. Their work showed that if a flood occurred there at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers.(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)