High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BC due to waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosporus Strait. The hypothesis made headlines when The New York Times published it in December 1996, shortly before it was published in an academic journal. While it is agreed that the sequence of events described did occur, there is debate over the suddenness, dating and magnitude of the events. Two opposing hypotheses have arisen to explain the rise of the Black Sea: gradual, and oscillating.:15 The oscillating hypothesis specifies that over the last 30,000 years, water has intermittently flowed back and forth between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea in relatively small magnitudes, and does not necessarily presuppose that there occurred any sudden "refilling" events.