[Beat me to it, Bill, but I'll post it anyway.]

It's not surprising that there are legends of massive floods among various cultures around the world, considering a few historical facts.

In eastern Washington State, there is an extensive area of unusual geological formations, as if the whole area had been scrubbed clean. Geologists have determined the cause of this.

The Channeled Scablands were created in the Columbia Plateau by cataclysmic Ice Age Floods between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago. The floods occurred about every 50 years and lasted a few days to a few weeks, leaving a deeply scarred plateau.

During the last Ice Age, huge lakes or inland seas existed in a number of places around the world. For example, the Bonneville Salt Flats is the bottom of what was once an inland sea. And many of these lakes and seas were kept in place by massive ice dams.   At the end of the Ice Age, the ice forming these dams melted and often release cataclysmic floods. Geologists have determined that a wave some 700 feet high swept across what is now the Scablands as many as eighteen times as the ice dam thawed, refroze, and thawed again over a period of a couple of thousand years at the end of the last Ice Age.

Northwest Indians have some pretty hairy flood legends. You might say the floods in these legends are of "Biblical proportions."

I recently saw a science program in which, around 1997, scientists discovered the remnants of several villages about 200 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. The claim is made that both the Black and Caspian Seas were vast freshwater lakes at one time, but that about 5600 BCE, an ice dam thawed and broke, allowing the Mediterranean to pour in through the Bosporus and inundate villages that had been built at the lakeshores. "This has led some to associate this catastrophe with prehistoric flood myths."

At the end of the last Ice Age, the melting of ice dams released a lot of water and caused a lot of floods of epic proportions. It should be no surprise that there are lots of flood myths and legends.

And as we know, there is a tendency for the fish—even the big ones—to get bigger every time the story gets told.

Don Firth