* Astronomy

The History of the Black Sea Revealed in its Sediments

Until about 5,000 years ago, the Black Sea was a brackish lake cut off from world oceans until sea-level rise fed by melting glaciers connected it with the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. A record of that history exists in its seafloor sediments and even in its present-day waters.
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Huge river discovered flowing on Black Sea bed

A massive underwater river flowing along the bottom of the Black Sea has been found by scientists - a discovery that could help explain how life manages to survive in the deep oceans away from the nutrient-rich waters found close to land.
It is estimated that if on land, the undersea river would be the world's sixth largest in terms of the volume of water flowing through it.
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The North Anatolian Fault (NAF) is a major active right lateral-moving geologic fault in northern Anatolia which runs along the tectonic boundary between the Eurasian Plate and the Anatolian Plate. The fault extends westward from a junction with the East Anatolian Fault at the Karliova Triple Junction in eastern Turkey, across northern Turkey and into the Aegean Sea. It runs about 20 km south of Istanbul.
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New evidence rebuts controversial theory of Black Sea deluge
A long time ago, whether your time frame is biblical or geological, the Black Sea was a large freshwater Black "Lake." It was cut off from the Mediterranean Sea by a high piece of land that dammed the entry of salty seawater through the narrow connecting Bosphorus valley.
When Earth's last ice age waned, water frozen into vast ice sheets melted and returned to the ocean, elevating sea levels. About 9,400 years ago, Mediterranean waters rose above the dam, reconnecting the two seas. They surged over the now submerged Bosphorus Sill with the force of 200 Niagara Falls, according to a controversial theory proposed in 1997 by Columbia University marine geologists Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman. Now, a new study in the January 2009 issue of Quaternary Science Reviews suggests that if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller - hardly of biblical proportions. Liviu Giosan of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Florin Filip and Stefan Constantinescu of the University of Bucharest found evidence that Black Lake/Sea water levels rose only 5 to 10 meters around 9,400 years ago, not 50 to 60 meters as Ryan and his colleagues proposed. The flood would have drowned only about 2,000 square kilometres of land, rather than 70,000 square kilometres.

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