Post Author: Bill Pratt
A study has just been released where researchers have shown how wind could have parted the Red Sea.
Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado have found a location in the Nile River’s ancient delta where an east wind — blowing at 63 mph for 12 hours — could have pushed back the waters and exposed a muddy land bridge.
When the wind died down, the water would have come rushing back, according to NCAR’s Carl Drews, lead author of a paper published today in the journal PLoS ONE.
Drews scoured old maps of the way the Nile River delta and the waterways around the Red Sea’s Gulf of Suez may have looked thousands of years ago. Eventually, he found a map that showed an ancient river merging with a coastal lagoon near the Mediterranean, forming a U shape.“It formed this bend in the body of water facing east,” Drews said. “When the wind blew from the east, the water would split around the bend — you can imagine that peninsula cutting the water like a ship’s prow.”
Ultimately, Drews didn’t know what was possible until he ran a computer simulation. When he did, he found that if a 63 mph wind blew for 12 hours, the 6-foot-deep water in the east-facing bend would have been pushed back, creating a dry passage more than two miles long and three miles wide.