The real landscape of Noah's great flood myth

NAUTILUS
By David R. Montgomery

Illustration of Tibetan flood myth and Noah's Ark by Kyle Stecker @KyleStecker

INDIA---The story of the great flood is one of the oldest and most widely told. A version of this legend appears in so many cultures that some pseudoscientific theorists have invoked its ubiquity as evidence of a global flood. I’m a geomorphologist—I study landforms and construct scientific narratives to explain the evolutionary processes that created and molded them. For years, I believed that my stories stood apart from myth in that they were forged in the topography of real landscapes—in the shape of hills to the lay of valleys. But that was before I visited the Tsangpo. I pondered these two stories—one cast in culture, the other written on land. Could they be telling different versions of the same affair? [link]