Evidence of Africa's wet climate in the past points to Biblical Great Flood, says Christian physicist

A Christian physicist has claimed that the new evidence indicating that the Sahara desert was once a lush tropical climate is consistent with the predictions of biblical creationists.

Based on the analysis of marine sediment cores located off the northwestern African coast, a team of scientists has estimated that the Sahara desert had 10 times more rainfall in the past than it does today.

The findings suggested that humans inhabited the Sahara and lived off the animals and plants that lived in the region's savannahs and wooded grasslands between 5,000 and 11,000 years ago, according to University of Arizona News.

"Our precipitation rate estimates confirm the interpretation that a seasonal tropical climate dominated most regions of North Africa during the Green Sahara time," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was published in the journal "Science Advances."

Jessica Tierney, associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona and the lead author of the study, noted that there was a thousand-year dry period that caused the people to leave.

Biblical creationists do not agree with the age estimates of the study, but some have asserted that the findings point to the global flood described in Genesis.

Dr. Jake Hebert, a physicist with the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), claimed that scientific models based on the Bible predict an extremely wet period after the Great Flood, Christian News Network reported.

"Rapid seafloor spreading and volcanic activity during the Genesis Flood would have significantly warmed the world's oceans," Hebert wrote in an article published by ICR late last month.

"This would have greatly increased evaporation, putting much more moisture into the atmosphere. This increased moisture would have resulted in much more precipitation, in the form of snow, in the higher latitudes and on mountaintops, and rain at lower latitudes and elevations," he added.

Hebert pointed out that North Africa is not the only dry region that was once wet and tropical. He noted that the Bible testifies that some parts of the Middle East had more rainfall and vegetation than today.

The physicist contended that secular scientists are having difficulties explaining the past climate change.

Hebert explained that some uniformitarian scientists have attributed the Sahara's past climate to the changes in Earth's orbital motions, which caused a small increase in solar radiation some 9,000 years ago. But he argued that there are some problems with attributing past climate change to astronomical motions. He also pointed out that the argument for the astronomical theory has been invalid for a quarter century.

He concluded that the Biblical model provides a better explanation than secular theories. "The conclusion of increased Saharan rainfall in the recent past is in perfect agreement with the history recorded in Genesis," he said.