Floods

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by timojin, Sep 28, 2017.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    It's not so much that you need to assume he is making sense - you have to assume certain things to deduce that he is making sense, to see sense in his responses.

    You have to assume, for example, that when he talks about the world being smaller then, he is talking about the legend-maker's perceptions of what we now know to be a small region of a much larger, essentially spherical, planet. One with continents and oceans distributed then pretty much as they are today, in physical reality.

    If you thought of him in post 69, say, as referring to an actually smaller, non-planetary world, one lacking the continents and oceans we have today, that would alter your perception of him as making sense, no?
    If you thought of him as imagining floodwater overtopping the mountains of Sumeria for a month, while the rest of the planet was somehow unaffected, that would alter your perception of him as making sense, no?
     
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  3. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Instead of worrying about somebody else's behaviour, just make your point, if you have one.
     
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  5. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    An inference is a provisional conclusion derived from consideration of observations. i.e. it is based upon specific evidence. An assumption is an unfounded presupposition.

    I have checked a couple of online dictionaries and find no instances where these two words are declared to be synonyms. If there are such instances they relate to rare and unusual usage. I attempt to use words in their more usual sense within the relevant context.
     
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  7. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    I've made my point, but I keep getting sidetracked by you worrying about my behaviour.
     
  8. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    Certainly.

    Equally if I thought that he did not speak English and had only arrived at this combination of words by chance then I would have not have thought he made sense. However, without evidence to the contrary there is no reason to doubt that his words mean what they appear to mean.

    Now you and others appear to have prior knowledge of timojin and his beliefs that he does not mean what a reasonable examination of his words would suggest. So we do indeed have some assumptions going on here:

    • You assume that timojin continues on his historical path of talking nonsense, based upon prior experience,
    • I assume that timojin means, reasonably, what he appears to mean, based upon no reason to think otherwise.
    If we go that far then assumptions underly every action and thought we have and the assertion that I was making assumptions becomes trite and trivial.
     
  9. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    11,888
    That's funny, I typed 'inference synonym' into google and this is the first one that comes up.
    inference synonym

    I get it though, this is the age Trump, so as he has shown us you just deny, deny, deny.

    So to you, I say, bye-bye.

    'click'
     
  10. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    Mirror, mirror on the wall.

    I find it remarkable that you genuinely find the two words to constitute a commonplace or reasonable sysnonym and stick to that position depsite abundant evidence to the contrary. (Try doing more than some online googling. ) However, since you have distastefully associated me with the cretin Trump and his rhetorical flim-flam I welcome your farewell. However, I am available from time to time when you are ready to apologise.
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Not "equally".

    There is no established body of posters on these forums engaged in that, and it is not met with frequently, and it is not something one might reasonably recognize in small details and flourishes of rhetoric, and it is in all respects unlikely.

    In forum discussions of the Noachian Flood, posters of wide varieties of creationist bs are routine and normal encounters - one would be more surprised to find a complete absence of them in a sequence of a hundred posts, than a presence.
    A little more careful attention to his posting might reveal such evidence to you, as it does to me.

    But that assessment is subjective. The point is that asking for clarification, from Timojin, is perfectly reasonable - and he should know that, if passing strangers do not.
     
  12. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    I agree completely. However, I never suggested that it was not reasonable to ask him for clarification. I only noted what I thought the outcome of that might be based upon my observation of his posts in this thread. I would have asked him myself by now if I hadn't been sidetracked by almost pointless discussions over assumptions.

    timojin, would you mind telling the assembled masses - is my interepretation of your meaning, accurate or not? If not what did you mean. Thank you in advance.
     
  13. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    12,454
    I must say I rather agree. This thread, which seems to have originally been about real floods that might have inspired the Middle Eastern flood myths (at least, that is how I read it when responding back on page 1 about the Straits of Hormuz), seems latterly to have degenerated into an attempt to smoke out the presumed religious beliefs of the person who started the thread. Which strikes me as as irrelevant to the topic, not to mention needlessly intrusive in this context.

    I would welcome a return to the science of the various floods that geology indicated may have actually occurred since Homo Sapiens appeared, and the archaeological and historical evidence for who might have experienced them or written about them.
     
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  14. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    Yes, yes, yes. The practical difficulties of submarine archaeology are much less to day than even a couple of decades ago, yet they are still challenging and consequently there is still probably a great deal to learn.

    Was the mythical flood of Noah a garbled recollection of the flooding of the Gulf, of the Black Sea, or an extreme flood event in the Tigris-Euphrates? Civilisation was developing as sea levels were rising with the retreat of the glaciers. Where else might we find evidence that would shed light on those times? (I'd love to drain the South China Sea!) I'm certainly done with the "assumption" discussion. Let's get back on track. Here's a link to one I had never heard of before - The Great China Flood.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Or the Nile. Given that at least 50% of the pre-Christian religions had a flood-based creation myth, that's pretty likely.
     
  16. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    I haven't said anything about your behaviour. I'm just trying to figure out what your point is. Feel free to repeat yourself.
     
  17. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    The question remains: Why does it have to be an "extreme" flood?

    Look at the disaster movies of the 1970s. They were just exaggerated accounts of "ordinary" earthquakes and infernos. There's no need to have an extreme event as a basis. All you need to do is scale up an ordinary one.
     
  18. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    12,454
    Could be. But the fact is that there are actually some tantalising bits of evidence for truly catastrophic floods. I can't find anything to support Timojin's conjecture about the Straits of Hormuz, but I certainly have read, not only of a catastrophic flood when the Black Sea connected to the Med, but also a theory that even the Straits of Dover might have been eroded suddenly, by a breakthrough of meltwater after the end of the Ice Age. (Not that I'm suggesting the latter might have led to a Middle Eastern flood myth, of course.) More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Dover
    Mind you, this would have been too long ago for humanity to have preserved a memory of it, I think,

    I thought the Straits of Hormuz idea was rather an interesting question, as there is a depression (foredeep) to the Zagros mountains and the Straits of Hormuz do involve quite dramatic cliffs. I used to go "wadi-bashing" across the base of the Musandam Peninsula when I lived in Dubai and would love to know about the geology of the region.
     
  19. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    8,466
    google earth
    (really great stuff---)

    If the filling of the Persian gulf is the source of the flood stories, then it most likely happened via rising sea levels, and, not from river flooding.
    Nearby we can see that the Indus carved out quite the trench while emptying into the Arabian sea----most likely from massive runoff from retreating glacial ice. As did the meghna into the bay of Bengal.
     
    Last edited: Oct 27, 2017
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    The audience would have experienced normal ranges of flooding - which is pretty dramatic: in the days when almost everyone lived near rivers and oceans sudden local inundation and water to the near horizon was not disastrous in most people's lives, but seasonal and fertility building. This is especially the case with the more settled or nomadically civilized people, living at least seasonally in towns universally on fair sized rivers, gardening the rich soil of flood plains; those are the people who supported the kinds of professional singers and storytellers who could keep a body of long tales at hand and deliver at the appropriate times, bards with scribes in the audience, or who could themselves when the time came learn to read and write.

    The Noachian Flood was not seasonal - not a "normal" flood. In the story it happened to people settled enough and familiar enough with flooding to know how to build large boats, and it wasn't anything like what they expected or could handle - they couldn't get to their own boats, even.

    So it's not that the original inspiration had to be, but more that it was likely to have been, one of the several truly spectacular and out of season floods that happened as the landscape came out of the ice, a few thousand years ago. This is not a fringe or bizarre notion - the story, the floods, the people, are all pretty standard residents of the historical landscape. We have jökulhaups yet today - small scale reminders and indicators of what things were like during the Great Melt.
     
  21. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    3,864
    If you're in a flood, it's extreme. Perspective is everything.
     
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  22. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Slightly off-topic, but in the course of trying (unsuccessfully) to find something about the formation of the Straits of Hormuz, I came across this amazing picture, showing "salt glaciers" in the Zagros mountains of Iran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormuz_Formation#/media/File:SaltGlaciers_ZagrosMtns_20010810.jpg

    They are the two dark formations in the picture. I have never seen anything like that before: a slow-motion eruption of salt, from deposits within the fold belt of the mountains.
     
  23. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    Try this. Here is the abstract.

    Aeolian dunes cover most of the United Arab Emirates and a large part of the eastern Arabian Peninsula. Although these sands, as well as older aeolianites, are largely composed of quartz, there is a high percentage of detrital carbonate in them south of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf for more than 40 km; this percentage decreases inland. These carbonate grains consist mainly of marine bioclastic fragments and calcareous ooids, and were derived from the floor of the Persian Gulf, which was exposed during low sea level of the last glacial period.
    The postglacial rise in sea level rapidly reflooded the floor of the Persian Gulf, cutting off the source for these aeolian sediments. Between 12 and 6 ka, the sea transgressed more than 1000 km, inundating the extended route of the Tigris-Euphrates River and forcing people living on the exposed floor of the Gulf to abandon their settlements. Because of the varying rate of eustatic sea level rise, these waters at times flooded across the flat floor of the Persian Gulf at more than a kilometer per year. We proposed that the stories of a great flood, recorded in the Bible as Noah's Flood and in Babylonian history on clay tablets (excavated in the Tigris-Euphrates delta) as the Epic of Gilgamesh, are a record of this rapid postglacial flooding of the floor of the Persian Gulf.
     
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