Calcareous dunes of the United Arab Emirates and Noah's Flood: the postglacial reflooding of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf

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.