It was remembered in numerous flood legends, including Mesopotamian ones, which inspired the story of Noah's Flood.
Or so proposes Dr. Bruce Masse, who has long been researching mythologies for memories of spectacular geological and astronomical events (Los Alamos Dateline December 1999). He had done work on Hawaiian oral tradition, which is connected with royal genealogies that go back some 2000 years.
This work is sometimes called geomythology (Myth and geology). Students of that subject recognize that some such stories are origin myths or "just so stories". But some of them are likely garbled memories of long-ago dramatic events.A more recent legendary battle is told between Pele and a half-man, half-hog demigod named Kamapua’a, translated meaning the sparkling bundle of eyes. This story is an accurate description, or encoding, of the coincidence of the 1301 appearance of Halley’s Comet with the largest rift eruption in Kilauea volcano history.
On the Estonian island of Saaremaa is the Kaali crater, one of a group of 9 meteorite craters that were produced 660 +/- 85 BCE. Some local people have legends that are likely memories of this meteorite fall.
At Campo de Cielo is a field of craters that was produced around 2200 - 2700 BCE by falling meteorites. In the early 20th cy., some local people described how a piece of the Sun had once fallen out of the sky.
But many legendary events have been hard to correlate with real ones. Bruce Masse got the idea that many of them may refer to larger and more distant events. If he could find patterns in them, he could have some clues to work from for identifying their origins.
He noticed that flood myths were very common, and he wondered if some big catastrophe could have caused many of them.
These additional details do not seem like necessary parts of a flood story, and they are reported on by widely-separated people. So it's likely that they are remembering the same event. In fact,The majority of the myths describe a torrential, long-duration rainstorm, in many cases accompanied by a huge tsunami. The water is often described as hot, sometimes coming as hot ocean swells, sometimes as burning rain. The described durations of the flood storm in the various myths, when plotted, form a bell-shaped curve with the great majority clustering between four and ten days. Tsunamis are described as extending between 15 and 100 km inland. Survivors typically find refuge in places between 150 and 300 meters above sea level.
Supernatural creatures are associated with the flood storm in nearly half the cases Masse studied. Typical are giant snakes or water serpents, giant birds, giant horned snakes, a fallen angel, a star with fiery tail, a tongue of fire, and similar elongated things in or from the sky. Looking in detail at descriptions in the mythology, particularly those of the Indian subcontinent, Masse sees a close resemblance to the naked-eye appearance of a near-earth post-perihelion comet.
Sixteen of the myths Masse examined describe when the flood storm occurred in terms of seasonal indicators. Fourteen myths are from Northern Hemisphere groups, and place the event in the spring. The one from the Southern Hemisphere places it in the fall--that is, spring north of the equator. Seven stories give the time in terms of lunar phase--six at the time of the full Moon, another two days later. Stories from Africa and South America say it happened at the time of a lunar eclipse, which can only occur when the Moon is full. A 4th century BC Babylonian account specifies a full Moon in late April or early May.
That may make it hard for his colleagues to take him seriously; it's an awfully strong claim that may depend on some rather stretchy interpretation.Masse's analysis of astrological references in multiple myths from the Middle East, India and China--describing planetary conjunctions associated with the flood storm, whose actual times of occurrence can be reconstructed using contemporary astronomy software--leads him to conclude that the event happened on or about May 10, 2807 BC.
A disaster that large ought to have left some physical traces, and it possibly has. The Fenambosy Chevron in Madagascar and similar chevron-shaped structures in Madagascar and Australia point to the location of the Burckle Crater.
However, some geologists have pointed out that the chevron structures of southeast Madagascar ought to be pointed inland. I have assessed that question, and one gets it by using a geometrical-optics approximation of a tsunami's travels. That's low-amplitude and short-wavelength with result to travel-velocity variations.
From Dispersion (water waves), a water wave has angular frequency (w = 2*pi*frequency) related to angular wavenumber (k = 2*pi/wavelength) by
w2 = (g+T*k2/density)*k*tanh(k*h)
in the small-amplitude limit, where g is the acceleration of gravity, T is the surface tension, and h is the water depth. The phase velocity is w/k, while the group velocity is dw/dk (how fast a group of waves travel).
In the deep-water limit (wavelength < depth), w = sqrt(g*k) or vg = (1/2)*sqrt(g/k)
In the shallow-water limit (wavelength > depth), w = k*sqrt(g*h) or v = sqrt(g*h)
One can show that the waves should get focused shoreward as they slow down from the ocean getting shallower and shallower (Snell's law).
However, if the tsunami waves have long enough wavelengths or large enough amplitudes, they may violate the geometrical-optics limit. So I think that it's still up in the air.
Geomythology and the Burckle Crater
Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth - Do Global Myths Reflect an Ancient Disaster?
Archaeological Traces of Holocene Impacts - Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth
Global Flood Mythologies - Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth
Plotting Mythic Events - The Burckle Crater - Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth
The Holocene Impact Working Group
Megatsunami
Earth, Air, Fire and Water: The Archaeology of Bronze Age Cosmic Catastrophes | Society for Interdisciplinary Studies