Yeah I wanna see those aurorae pics. Very curious to see how strong and how far from the poles it'll be visible.
I don't think the flood was literally flowing water. We know for certain that most of the earth has been covered in ice, which is water, several times, and many if those times while homo sapiens have been here.
Africa becomes jungly when the earth is hotter - the heat causes increased evaporation off the ocean, which dumps over land. So there's an easy way to mess with the CO2 narrative - periods of low CO2 cause desertification, as the Sahara proves. Supposedly. I can believe ice cores, but there's no ice cores in north africa.
The bible leaves a couple really good clues about the Ark. One is the fact that it has exactly the same design as a synagogue. This is something I need to do more research on, because I suspect synagogues have the same layout as Egyptian temples. Even if not, it symbolically links the physical church with refuge, which is pretty cool.
And another weird clue is, the inside of the ark is bigger than the outside. So if this is a physical thing, its bending space or something. It makes me wonder if its the same ark they dragged around the desert was what Noah used to skip the "flood." That would make the part with directions on how to build the ark an embellishment, and there are scholars that specialize in spotting embellishments in parts of the bible. So there could be ways to test the hypothesis.