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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
- bandibus 5y agoThis is sort of a sequel to a piece about the ancient Mediterranean megaflood that did really well on here last month - so, with my fingers crossed it's not too obnoxiously self-promotional of me to do it, I thought I'd give this one a punt as well. Also, thank you to those who left comments saying you didn't like that former piece's introduction. I agree with you! It was rambling and a bit self-indulgent and I should have just got on with the story. This one does that (I think). Cheers.
- klyrs 5y agoThanks, I think this is great! I've often wondered if the "great flood" myths and the legend of Atlantis have any factual basis carried on in oral history. The Zanclean flood stretches credulity beyond reason (as fun as it is to think about a story passed down from the first Hominins), but this event happened recently enough to ponder links to mythology... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessair
- greatpostman 5y agoPlatos account of Atlantis which was destroyed ten thousand years prior matches geological artifacts of huge climate changes/end of the ice age. I’d say the evidence point to his stories legitimatacy
- throwaway568 5y agoRelevant: https://www.q-mag.org/the-great-plain-of-atlantis-was-it-in-doggerland.html https://www.q-mag.org/the-great-plain-of-atlantis-was-it-in-...
- neaden 5y agoGreat flood maybe, but we don't have any actual proof that Atlantis was some ancient legend vs something Plato just made up and said he heard from someone else since there are no previous accounts of it before him.
- munk-a 5y agoAlso, please bear in mind that there's a good reason to suspect that Plato bent a lot of things to suit his goal of trying to explain philosophical concepts. Socrates is often hailed as one of the greatest western philosophers but we have almost no record of his character outside the dramatizations written by Plato. We're almost certain he was a real person but if Plato is to be trusted he was extremely against any preservation of his discourses - almost everything we've got on him comes from Plato describing his mentor. So Atlantis might be much the same - the story of a city lost to flooding (maybe even the same root story as the biblical one) repurposed and embellished to express a philosophical point.
- neaden 4y agoWhile I agree with you about Plato, I think you are underestimating our other sources on Socrates. The historian Xenephon was also one of his students and talked about him in his works, including Socrates' trial and death. The playwright Aristophanes also parodied Socrates in one of his works and while it is a parody what it is parodying is consistent with what we know of Socrates' philosophy as presented by Plato and shows he was a fairly well known figure at least among the play going audience.
- akomtu 5y agoThere should be some traces of it still. Per the legend, the last day of Atlantis was the day Sahara became a desert, so inspecting it should reveal something. Also, "Atlantis" is a made up term (by Plato?). Again, per the legend, that nation called themselves "lanka" and I wonder if Sri Lanka ("Holy Lanka ") was named this way for a reason.
- joshuaissac 5y agoThe Gunditjmara Australian story "Dreamtime" recounts the eruption of the now-dormant volcano Budj Bim about 37,000 years ago.[1][2] So it is possible for accounts of historical events to be transmitted orally over a very long period of time. 1. https://www.awe.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/national/budj-bim https://www.awe.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/nation... 2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/study-dates-victorian-volcano-that-buried-a-human-made-axe/11991290 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/study-dates-victorian...
- argomo 5y agoNo offense, but I couldn't get into this piece due to the upfront clutter. Some readers may find it charming, but the privilege comment, the chart tweet, the subscribe button, the references to various novels... I just wasn't finding a good starting point to latch onto the content promised by the (excellent) headline. It felt like I had jumped into the middle of a podcast where the hosts are bantering and not making much progress on the discussion.
- bandibus 5y agoThat's a fair comment, thank you. I originally wrote it that way because it was for longterm readers, with a bunch of callbacks to previous stuff, as you mention there. But for first-time visitors, it could be seen as clutter. I've cut some of that out, and I think you're right. Cheers!
- imilk 5y agoJust scroll past the 2nd picture and start reading.
- dylan604 5y agoJust... do that thing that nobody does on a normal basis, nor should they be expected to. Just. Has to be one of my favorite words.
- munk-a 5y agoWhether you think wearing my mouse wheel down to actually get to the directions for any recipe posted on a blog is good or not - it certainly is normal... and ditto for websites having a lot of above the fold advertisements.
- dylan604 5y ago>recipe posted on a blog is good or not - it certainly is normal. and pretty much universally abhorred by anyone but SEO types > websites having a lot of above the fold advertisements I wouldn't know about these. I have an adblocker. seems like a cheap price to pay to prevent unnecessary wear&tear on your mouse wheel.
- formerkrogemp 5y agoIt's great to see the follow up piece! I enjoyed the read, and I think many others will too.
- bandibus 5y agoThank you! :)
- EGreg 5y agoMegaflood? I thought the Biblical flood had no evidence for it
- simonh 5y agoThere have been many floods in many places throughout history, including the Mediterranean and Middle East. There is no evidence specifically for a global flood with all the very specific characteristics of the biblical flood, or the Mesopotamian flood myth it’s almost certainly based on. That doesn’t mean these mythical floods had no basis in fact, and weren’t inspired by real floods. It just depends how literally you take the specifics of how they are described in the sources.
- labster 5y agoRight. If you lived near a lake in the endorheic basin at the end of the Danube, it would sure seem like the whole world had flooded when the Black Sea came flooding in. Protip: the Bible can still be the literal word of God, because omnipotence implies the ability to use simile, metaphor, analogy, symbolism, and storytelling tropes.
- simonh 4y agoAs well as inconsistent and even self-contradictory.
- arkey 4y agoCould you give some evidence for that? Could you reference specific inconsistencies and contradictions?
- Jedd 4y agoHave you genuinely been unable to identify any? They're manifest and generally well documented. A nicely topical example, given we've just had Easter, would be around the time of the crucifixion -- was it at 9am on the morning of Passover, or midday the day after passover? The gospels provide conflicting timelines - Mathew, Mark, & Luke say 9am on passover, John says the afternoon the day after passover. There are myriad other contradictions around the descriptions of the crucifixion mythology: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Contradictions_in_Jesus%27_crucifixion https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Contradictions_in_Jesus%27_cru... This may be a useful jumping-off point for other inconsistencies: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_contradictions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_contradictions
- AndrewDucker 4y ago"look west to where the Netherlands used to be" - should be East.
- bandibus 4y agoOops! Thank you. :)
- christkv 5y agoReminds me about the theory about how the Persian Gulf was the origin of the first civilisations and the origin of the myth of paradise. As the water rose people was displaced and eventually ended up forming ur.
- dgellow 5y agoIn case people aren't familiar with Ur (I wasn't): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur > Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometres from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in written history as a city-state from the 26th century BC, its first recorded king being Mesannepada. The pictures of the Ziggurat are really impressive.
- christkv 5y agoYou might enjoy this podcast about the rise and fall of the Sumerians https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA
- dgellow 4y agoThanks for sharing :)
- HappyDreamer 5y agoI also wasn't. Quite depressing laws they had, I think: 6. If a man violates the right of another and deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male. 7. If the wife of a man followed after another man and he slept with her, they shall slay that woman, but that male shall be set free. ... and slaves of course ... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu#Surviving_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu#Surviving_law... ) Has it been like that for 4000+ years (at some places) :-( > pictures of the Ziggurat are really impressive Yes :-)
- greatpostman 5y agoI think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the cessation of which caused the floods, which destroyed large swaths of human “civilization”
- arbitrage 5y agoYour suppositions are interesting, but there's simply no proof of them.
- Naga 5y agoAbsence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Unfortunately most of the (probable) evidence is under meters of water and mud.
- LeanderK 5y agoBut also untouched. Maybe we'll find a way to dig up evidence in the future...
- judahmeek 5y agoIs there such a thing as "evidence of absence"?
- imtringued 4y agoIt's called a contradiction and it can only exist in the realms of logic.
- earleybird 5y agoI'm thinking that would be demonstrating that there cannot be evidence.
- deleted 5y ago
- pferde 5y agoThere is an interesting Youtube video by AlternateHistoryHub on exactly this topic ("What if Britain Wasn't An Island?"), so if you're interested in a bit of theorizing about what could've been or might've been, I recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssoKkvDbJpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssoKkvDbJpE
- anm89 5y agoIt's pretty fascinating to comprehend how different Europe's land mass is from a couple thousand years ago. Imagining the current world with shore lines as different as that is pretty hard to Fathom. It puts the climate change narrative in perspective a bit. In someways, the change we are experiencing isn't as unprecedented as some people perceive. In other ways, if we are going to be on a highly accelerated version of something like the event in the story than we are going to be in for a hell of a ride.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThis xkcd shows how highly accelerated it is: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- del_operator 5y agoDidn’t Time Team cover these topics and more?
- ugl 5y agoYep. Twice. Posted a link upstream.
- ugl 5y agoTime Team did an episode/dig about this, and another sbout doggerland in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTvOcm5dgDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTvOcm5dgDI
- gorm 5y agoThe BBC program "In our time" did an episode on Doggerland some years back https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006707 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006707
- robscallsign 5y agoI'm curious if anyone has a similar image of the shoreline of the west coast of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington state, etc.
- dredmorbius 5y agoTry searching for "last glacial maximum" and keywords such as "coastline" "sea level", etc. This is a collection of plausible renderings: https://pammack.sites.clemson.edu/lec392/earley2.html https://pammack.sites.clemson.edu/lec392/earley2.html Channel Islands off the coast of present-day Santa Barbara, CA. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-northern-Channel-Islands-and-portions-of-the-adjacent-mainland-showing-Pleistocene_fig2_329407276 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-northern-Channel-Isl...
- rurban 5y agoTurns out it was about 2.5m. Off by factor 10. And only a wild theory for the disappearance of Doggerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
- Merad 5y agoWhere are you getting the 2.5m figure from? The article you linked doesn't give a figure as far as I can see, but it says sediments have been found 4m above _current_ tide levels and that water went 29km inland in Scotland. Both of those figures seem to be at odds with a relatively small 2.5m tsunami (for comparison, the Fukashima earthquake produced a 15m tsunami).
- eesmith 5y agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1463500314001164?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146350031... (reference [13] from Wikipedia) comments: > The north-eastern coast of the UK experienced waves between 3–6 m, much like the eastern coast of Scotland ... Wave heights are predicted to be around 1 m on the UK coast and up to 5 m on the northern coast of Doggerland. The maximum elevation of Doggerland here is less than 10 m, with large areas of less than 5 m. It is therefore possible that much of Doggerland would have been flooded by such a wave. In reading now about the factors involved in this work, one issue is the amount of post-glacial rebound. While I've found that Scotland has rebounded a lot, I can't figure out how much that has been since 8,000 years ago. If I read figure 1 of http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/152.pdf http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/152.pdf correctly, the Bridge of Earn, Firth of Fourth was 4 meters lower, relative to sea level rise back then. I also know that geography can cause tsunamis to have local effects which are much stronger than average, as when a narrowing bay channels the wave upward. But I have no clue how that relates to the deposits seen in Scotland. Edit: and figure 3 seems to say Dogger Bank was 6 meters higher (relative to sea level) than now, again, due to post-glacial rebound effects.
- bandibus 4y agoI got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts): "Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland." https://www.britannica.com/topic/Storegga-slides https://www.britannica.com/topic/Storegga-slides
- Aeolun 5y agoMy main takeaway from this is that it’s hilarious that someone would think the Netherlands could disappear due to a paltry 5m rise in sea level :)
- trenchgun 5y agoFucking stop using miles. Just. Use . The Ducking. Metric. System.
- hnbad 4y agoThe title seems to use meters as the article says "anything up to 25 meters". It's a bit jarring how it switches between systems and then gives conversions on some imperial units but not others. It's also odd to read about Europe in measurements like "cubic miles" given there's only one country in Europe using imperial and their system is different from the US imperial. The author is a self-described "Yorkshireman" so I assume it's UK imperial but I have no idea what that means for American audiences. Are US and UK miles the same?
- bandibus 4y agoYes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged! (In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)
- bandibus 4y ago(I also wrote about all this in another newsletter, here: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/imperial-vs-metric https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/imperial-vs-metri... This isn't me claiming Britain isn't idiotic on this matter, though...)
- daveslash 4y agoI'm U.S., and I'd assert that all of our informational conveyance (from language to measurements) is a confusing mashup. English is a pidgin language, and we're so accustomed to the weird mashup that it doesn't seem jarring to us sometimes to mix metric and imperial in the same context. Not defending it (because it's honestly awful), just explaining why we might not notice until it's pointed out to us.
- Radim 4y ago> since there’s no evidence that Mesolithic people were seafarers, who knows if there were people living there? Whyyyyyy? To hedge your bets with "no evidence" that these people managed to navigate shallow sea waters to a nearby island, which they had inhabited for thousands of years and knew like the back of their hand, seems… unnecessary? Disrespectful? I mean, we already know Mesolithic "hunter gatherers" managed absolutely mind-boggling feats of both art and engineering. More is becoming known every year, and it consistently amazes us in the direction of "No way!" Building a boat / canoe for island-hopping over well-mapped marshes and shallow seas is the least of it. If speculate on "no evidence" we must, my bet goes 100% in the opposite direction: The gradual increase in sea levels prompted new inventions and spectacular constructions, now lost to time. As far as speculations go, it seems a safer bet than "couldn't paddle".
- eesmith 4y agoHere are some citations which support you. From https://researchframeworks.org/maritime/the-mesolithic/#section-16 https://researchframeworks.org/maritime/the-mesolithic/#sect... > Evidence for Mesolithic seafaring includes the colonisation of islands involving long sea journeys, such as Shetland and the Outer Hebrides (Warren 2005), as well as the location of sites on islands involving very difficult sea crossings, such as Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) in North Wales, where one must negotiate the treacherous Swnt Enlli (Edmonds et al 2009). From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313001982 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031... > Tolan-Smith (2008, 151) notes that at this point there is clear evidence for Mesolithic seafaring, with Ireland being occupied along with the Isle of Man, Rhum, the Hebridean Archipelago and Howick on the East coast of England. Thus, as Warren (2005) and Garrow and Sturt (2011) have argued, there is ample evidence for a strong seafaring tradition in the Mesolithic.
- Radim 4y agoThanks for the links. I was starting to wonder whether I'd said something unforgivably controversial. What Doggerland – and underwater archeology in general – has to reveal is quite exciting. How did these Mesolithic people conceptualize the world and themselves? What innovations and dead-ends "didn't quite make it" (in the evolutionary sense) to the start of protohistory, to us today? So much of the juiciest evidence from that era is now under the sea! And which of those now-dead innovations were genuinely obsoleted ideas, and which died out due to ecological happenstance? A bad timing, bad place for an otherwise brilliant life hack… especially on the psychological/cultural/spiritual front. Unfortunately such aspects of prehistory are the hardest to piece together. But given the jaw-dropping accomplishments of many Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples, and given the time scales, even their maladaptations must be worth a study. In this age of Twitter, imagine something chiseled to perfection by groups of smart humans over thousands of years. Then swept away by something as "trivial" as a tsunami, or the agricultural revolution/slavery that marks the dawn of history. A truly multivariate optimization problem, with a rather shady objective function.