Production of the set for Aronofsky's "Noah" film. Photo: @DarrenAronofsky.

The famed archaeologist responsible for discovering the titanic wreck says that he thinks he has proof that the flood at the center of the biblical Noah’s Ark story actually happened.

Robert Ballard and his team are probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah. He told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour  that, using robotic technology to travel farther back in time, he is on a marine  archaeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.

“Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that’s a big ice cube,” he said, according to ABC News’ website. “But then it started to melt. We’re talking about the floods of our living history.”

The water from the melting glaciers met the world’s oceans causing floods all around the world.

“The questions is, was there a mother of all floods,” Ballard said.

According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was a great flood in the Black Sea region caused by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, and swept away everything in its path. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland.

“We went in there to look for the flood,” Ballard said. “Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed… The land that went under stayed under.”

Four hundred feet below the surface of the Black Sea, Ballard and his team found an ancient shoreline, proof to them that a catastrophic event did happen there. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event which would place it somewhere around 5,000 BC, roughly the same time some experts believe Noah’s flood could have occurred.