With over 4 trillion gallons of rushing water, it was a flood of biblical proportions. Villages for miles around were swallowed in a single, violent gulp. Yet a king arose out of the destructive floodwaters. By dredging of the flooded lands, he founded the Xia dynasty that would live on centuries. At least, that's how the epic Chinese legend goes.

And today scientists have found the first proof that this ancient Chinese legend is true.

A team of archaeologists and geographers, led by Qinglong Wu at Peking University, in Beijing, China has discovered sedimentary evidence that the Chinese 'Great Flood' really did happen. In roughly 1920 BC—as China was transitioning from the neolithic era to the bronze age—an enormous flood on the Yellow River barreled down a corridor now known as the Jishi Gorge, into the Guanting Basin in central China. Wu and his colleagues describe their discovery today in the journal Science.

To understand how Wu's team discovered the fingerprints of the 4 trillion gallon flood, you have to know how a such a disaster could have even arisen in the first place.

Around 4000 years ago, an earthquake rumbled through central China, creating a massive landslide in deep, narrow valley with rocky, steep sides. That landslide corked up the gorge, forming a pyramid-like dam of rock and dirt that blocked the Yellow River. Wu's team believes that for somewhere between 6 to 9 months, that dam held. As the riverbed downstream turned dry, a tenuous lake of 4 cubic miles of water—half the size of Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam—was growing.

The whole thing broke, releasing a horrific torrent of destruction.

But, as the rising lakewater eventually spilled over the new dam, it wasn't just a trickle. The whole thing broke, releasing a horrific torrent of destruction. "It's among the largest known floods to have happened on earth during the past 10,000 years. And it's more than 500 times larger than a flood we might expect on the Yellow River from a massive rainfall," says Darryl Granger—a geologist at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana—with the research team.

Wu's team pieced together this history by carbon dating two different types of soil samples. The first were samples taken from downstream, samples of what was once the ancient earthen dam. These were collected as far away as 15 miles down, including at an ancient settlement, which also has one of the earliest known remnants of noodles. That was instrumental in estimating the size of the ancient flood. "By identifying those sediments, and carefully surveying their locations, on both sides of the valley, we were able to find out the dimensions of that flood channel, so the size of it and the shape of it, and exactly how high the flood waters reached," Granger.

The second type of sample was taken from the remnants of the ancient dam itself. Although the dam broke around 4,000 years ago, not all of the dirt and soil that made it up was swept away. The lowest part of the dam is still buried under part of the Yellow river. Wu's team came across this strange sediment in 2008, and when they compared it with downstream dirt, realized what they had found.

Together these two types of samples let Wu's team piece together the history, creating fact out of a truly awesome event once thought to be little more than legend.

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