The Memory of Water: How Post-Glacial Sea-Level Rise May Have Seeded Humanity's Flood Myths — And What That Tells Us About Ourselves
A Cambridge maritime historian's viral thread sparks debate about whether ancient stories encode 12,000 years of environmental memory—or whether we're just pattern-matching again When maritime historian Nick Collins posted a thread claiming that flood myths from India to Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia preserve memories of post-Ice Age sea-level rise, it struck a nerve. The geological core—roughly 120 metres of sea-level rise between 20,000 and 6,000 years ago, drowning vast coastal plains from Sundaland to the Persian Gulf—is solid science. The interpretive leap—that specific myths encode specific events across millennia—is more contested. This article examines the evidence, the skeptics, the parallels to Erich von Däniken's methods, and the rigorous academic work of Patrick Nunn on Aboriginal Australian oral traditions dating back 7,000 to 13,000 years. It explores what geomythology can and cannot claim, where the linkages hold and where they fray, and what this all...