Randall Carlson

Now we're looking at processes that are global in extent.

And the Younger Dryas, when it was first proposed and dated to around roughly 13,000 years ago,

It was believed that it was probably confined to the North Atlantic and was because of changing ocean circulation.

And when you're referring to the Younger Dryas, you're referring to the flood.

Not specifically, however, what I think we're in right now is the correlation, the temporal or time correlation between the flooding and the climate change that was associated with that flooding.

I'm of the mind that the Plato's Dialogue, when Solon is talking to the Egyptian priests in

in probably Alexandria, Virginia, and they tell him, you Greeks are like children because you only know about one flood, but there were multiple floods.

And when you actually look at the deglaciation, it looks to me like there were maybe three episodes of extreme melting juxtaposed on top of the more, what we would think of as the normal melting.

One of them occurred around 14,600 years ago, and it was associated with what is called Meltwater Pulse 1A, because marine geologists and oceanographers had identified what they believed to be a very rapid period of sea level rise.

Keep in mind, when you've got all of that ice piled up on the continent,

Where does it come from?

Well, that water has come from the oceans, right?

So as the ice mass grows on the continents, ocean levels are going down because that water is being extracted from the ocean basins, precipitating out.

It's not melting in the spring and ultimately going back to the ocean basins.

So oceans were at least 400 feet lower than now, okay?

Well, marine geologists have been able to actually identify the evidence of where sea level was at for maybe 8,000 or 10,000 years, 400 feet below.

And they can actually track how the rise occurred.

And it was not a smooth rise.

It was a pulsed rise.

So there was meltwater pulse 1A dated at 14,600.