There is the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis, which basically posits that at the end of the latest Ice Age, as the sea levels rose as a result of glacial melting, an area of land separating the ocean from the Black Sea gave way, causing a massive migration of water over that break and into the Black Sea. To any human witnesses, this would have been a mind-blowing event that would almost certainly be told generation to generation, being embellished along the way.

There is a lot of evidence that this event happened, including the discovery of a shoreline 400' feet below water level. Of course it would not be a world-wide event, but to the primitive viewer it would certainly have been epic in proportion.

The question that will probably remain unanswered is whether or not early settlements in that area were witness to this event and subsequently morphed that event into the myth of a world-wide flood and, eventually, the flood stories that we know from the Epic of Gilgamesh and, eventually, the Talmud Torah.

Usually these arguments are put forth by creationists trying to prove that the Bible is true. They call it flood geology; it originated in the early 20th century with Seventh-day Adventist geologist George McCready, but was popularised by Henry M. Morris' book The Genesis Flood. This book uses a mix of theology (provided by John Whitcomb) and science (by Morris) to argue that the Earth is less than 10000 years old and that evolution is wrong ('young-earth creationism'). Central to flood geology is the idea that a global flood such as in the Bible could explain many modern geological features, including for example the Grand Canyon. These claims invariably turn out to be contradictory to established scientific explanations (after all, they have to squeeze millions or even billions of years of gradual processes in just a couple thousand years).

Source:

E.C. Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism: an Introduction, Berkeley 2009

Glacial erratics, large solitary rocks found in places where they don't appear to belong, were once believed to be the result of bibilical flooding by academic authorities. Charles Lyell is recognized as having provided the now accepted explanation in 1830, that they were the product of massive glaciers from the last ice age. Incidentally Darwin studied them during his Beagle voyage. This phenomenon has had a very strong impact in the history of sciences and was instrumental in our understanding of the geological history of Earth.

But what I find the most interesting about it is that common people living in the European alps had figured out the real reason for the rocks, unlike the savants who were still influenced by the biblical narrative at the turn of the 18th century. I heard of a couple examples such as this one dated 1815 and reported in 1845:

In August 1815, a geologist was coming back from a long trek on the glaciers at the bottom of the Lourtier valley (...) He spent the night in the hut of a chamois hunter named Jean-Pierre Perraudin who was to be his guide the next day. (...) They eventually talked about those huge granite blocks that are often found a great distance away from the cliffs they had split from. The geologist took great pain to explain how the savants had proven through profound computations how those erratic blocks had been transported in ancient times by water currents. Perraudin could not respond to all this, but he nodded doubtfully. "Seems to me that our glaciers used to be much larger than they are today. Our whole valley up to a great height over the Durrance torrent was filled by a large glacier that flowed down to Martigny, as shown by the the blocks you can find around the town, and they are way too big for water to have dragged them there." Speaking thusly, Perraudin could not imagine having made a great discovery and solved, with just common sense, a problem that the combined genius of the most famous geologists, armed with all the resources of science, had tried to conquer without success.

There's another one from the late 18th century but I can't seem to find it. Might even have been in Lyell's book.

An interesting question to ask is, how did these people figure it out? A dubious hypothesis is that of oral history spanning milleniums, one that is commonly put forth when prehistoric flooding events are hypothesised to be the basis for the biblical flood. Most likely, if they had seen extant glaciers over years, they might have figured out that they moved, however slowly, and they also might have simply noticed how they carry large rocks.

There is Zero evidence for a "Global Flood" ever happening. There were many ice dam breach floods that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age. The flood myths probably arise from ancient witnesses passing down the information as oral history, until someone wrote it down and made it a holy story.

See this USGS paper for more information on large historical floods. (This is a direct download link) The world's largest floods, past and present: http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1254/pdf/circ1254.pdf

Check out the references in the two Wikipedia articles below, there are some papers specifically about the Black Sea flood, and the mega-flood that made Brittan an island. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6904675.stm,

Here is a direct download link to a issue of the Ice Age Flood Institutes newsletter that compares the Missoula flood to the Kuray mega-flood in Russia. http://www.iafi.org/newsletters/iafi_news_mar_2007.pdf http://www.iceagefloodsinstitute.org/