If you look to actual science like geology and not apologetics bro-science there are times when sea level rises due to glacial shifts but:
"The scientific version of Noah's flood actually starts long before that, back during the last great glaciation some 20,000 years ago."
Evidence for a Flood | Science | Smithsonian
and
Young-Earth creationists claim that the Paleozoic sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon and the Mesozoic sedimentary rocks of the Grand Staircase north of the canyon, in which Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks occur, were deposited during Noah’s worldwide flood about 4,500 years ago (Hill 2002; Hill and Moshier 2009). I realize that readers of
Skeptical Inquirer accept modern scientific views on this subject, but this examination of the creationist claims might be useful when communicating with others less imbued with scientific thinking.
There are at least twenty-one scientific reasons a worldwide flood recounted in the Bible cannot have happened.
- The stair-stepped appearance of erosion of sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon with sandstones and limestones forming cliffs and shales forming gentle slopes cannot happen if all these rocks were deposited in less than one year. If the Grand Canyon had been carved soon after these rocks were deposited by a worldwide flood, they would not have had time to harden into solid rock and would have been saturated with water. Therefore, the sandstones and limestones would have slumped during the carving of the canyon and would not have formed cliffs (Hill et al. 2016).
- Salt and gypsum deposits, more than 200 feet thick, occur in the Paradox Formation in Utah just 200 miles north of the Grand Canyon, and these deposits are the same age as the Supai rocks in the Grand Canyon that were supposedly also deposited by Noah’s flood. Similar salt deposits, up to 3,000 feet thick, exist in various places on all continents and in layers of all geologic ages, and these deposits can only be produced by evaporation of sea water. Such evaporation could not have happened in repeated intervals in the midst of the forty days and forty nights of raining and during the supposed continuous deposition of sedimentary rocks by a worldwide flood and in which the only drying and evaporation is said to have occurred at the end of the flood (Collins 2006; 2009; 2012; Hill et al. 2016).
- Sand dunes with giant cross bedding occur in the Mesozoic rocks in Zion National Park and are further evidence that desert conditions occurred at the time of the supposed flood (Senter 2011; Collins 2017).
- and lay their eggs while they were fleeing from rising waters to reach higher ground (Senter 2011; Hill et al. 2016).
19 more reasons at:
"
Twenty-One Reasons Noah’s Worldwide Flood Never Happened - CSI
while it's possible there was a local flood the mythology contains all of the mythical narratives and hidden meaning that all of the other stories of floods contain. The story has inner meaning which I just learned doing research on it:
The Atrahasis Epic: The Great Flood & the Meaning of Suffering
The
Atrahasis is the Akkadian/Babylonian epic of the Great Flood sent by the gods to destroy human life. Only the good man, Atrahasis (his name translates as `exceedingly wise') was warned of the impending deluge by the god Ea who instructed him to build an ark to save himself. Atrahasis heeded the words of the god, loaded two of every kind of animal into the ark, and so preserved human and animal life on earth.
Written down in the mid-17th century BCE, the
Atrahasis can be dated by the colophon to the reign of the Babylonian King
Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646-1626 BCE) though the tale itself is considered much older, passed down through oral transmission. The
Sumerian Flood Story (known as the `
Eridu Genesis') which tells the same story, is certainly older (written down early 17th century BCE) and Tablet XI of the
Epic of Gilgamesh, which also relates the tale of the Great Flood, is even older than that (2150-1400 BCE, though this is the date of the
writing of
Gilgamesh and it may well be that the
Sumerian Flood story, in oral form, is actually older). While the story itself concerns a flood of universal proportions (even scaring the gods who unleashed it) most scholars recognize that it was probably inspired by a local event: flooding caused by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowing their banks.
While archaeological and geological evidence has shown such flooding was a fairly common occurrence, it is speculated that a particularly memorable flood served as the basis for the story. No recognized scholar working in the present day maintains the argument that there was ever a world-wide flood such as
Atrahasis and the other accounts depict (including the story of Noah and his Ark in the Biblical book of
Genesis). The Mesopotamian scholar Stephanie Dalley writes, "No flood deposits are found in third-millennium strata, and Archbishop Usher's date for the Flood of 2349 BC, which was calculated by using numbers in
Genesis at face value...is now out of the question."
The
Atrahasis begins after the creation of the world but before the appearance of human beings:
At first the gods enjoy the leisure the human workers afford them but, in time, the people become too loud and disturb the gods's rest. Enlil, the king of the gods, is especially annoyed by the constant disturbance from below and so decides to lessen the population by sending first a drought, then pestilence and then famine down upon the earth. After each of these plagues, the humans appeal to the god who first conceived of them, Enki, and he tells them what to do to end their suffering and return the earth to a natural, productive state. Enlil, finally, can stand no more and persuades the other gods to join him in sending a devastating flood to earth which will completely wipe out the human beings. Enki takes pity on his servant, the kind and wise Atrahasis, and warns him of the coming flood, telling him to build an ark and to seal two of every kind of animal within. Atrahasis does as he is commanded and the deluge begins:
The mother goddess, Nintu, weeps for the destruction of her children ("she was sated with grief, she longed for
beer in vain") and the other gods weep with her.
After the waters subside Enlil and the other gods realize their mistake and regret what they have done; yet feel there is no way they can un-do it. At this point Atrahasis comes out of his ark and makes a sacrifice to the gods. Enlil, though only just before wishing he had not destroyed humanity, is now furious at Enki for allowing any one to escape alive. Enki explains himself to the assembly, the gods descend to eat of Atrahasis' sacrifice, and Enki then proposes a new solution to the problem of human overpopulation: create new creatures who will not be as fertile as the last. From now on, it is declared, there will be
women who cannot bear children, demons who will snatch infants away and cause miscarriages, and women consecrated to the gods who will have to remain virgins. Atrahasis himself is carried away to paradise to live apart from these new human beings whom Nintu then creates.
The story would have served, besides simply as entertainment, to explain human mortality, those misfortunes attendant on childbirth, even the
death of one's child. Since overpopulation and the resultant noise had once brought down the terrible deluge which almost destroyed humanity, the loss of one's child could, perhaps, be more easily borne with the knowledge that such a loss helped to preserve the natural order of things and kept peace with the gods. The myth would have served the same basic purpose which such stories always have: the assurance that individual human suffering has some greater purpose or meaning and is not simply random, senseless pain. The Atrahasis, like the story of Noah's Ark, is finally a tale of hope and of faith in a deeper meaning to the tragedies of the human experience.