Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 3: And we're back with part three in our series called
Speaker 3: the Sunken Lands, about places on Earth that were relatively
Speaker 3: recently solid land but are now covered by the waters.
Speaker 3: In the previous two parts of this series, we discussed myths, legends,
Speaker 3: and obsolete theories of sunken lands, including the most popular
Speaker 3: drowned civilization Atlantis, an advanced island state discussed in the
Speaker 3: writings of Plato, which the majority of experts on the
Speaker 3: original sources seem to think is best interpreted as a
Speaker 3: fictional setting used to illustrate a point in Plato's writings,
Speaker 3: rather than a reference to a real place that actually existed.
Speaker 3: But of course that does not stop the many Atlantis
Speaker 3: hunters of the Internet.
Speaker 2: Right, and it doesn't stop the human imagination which has
Speaker 2: gone wild with the concept, as we discussed in many
Speaker 2: responsible ways and occasionally irresponsible with as well.
Speaker 3: Right. So, we also talked about the very real sunken
Speaker 3: land mass now known as dogger Land, which was a
Speaker 3: vast plane connecting Great Britain to mainland Europe during and
Speaker 3: for several thousand years following the Last Ice Age. Doggerland
Speaker 3: is a fascinating mystery that archaeologists and other scientists are
Speaker 3: learning more about all the time. But one of the
Speaker 3: most intriguing things that we've learned is that this drowned
Speaker 3: world was not only inhabited by humans for the few
Speaker 3: thousand years after it began warming at the beginning of
Speaker 3: the Holocene. It was something many experts have described it
Speaker 3: as something of a paradise, rich with resources and possibly
Speaker 3: one of the most densely populated places in Middle Stone
Speaker 3: Age Europe. But of course it was eventually smothered underneath
Speaker 3: rising seas and also battered by a colossal tsunami from
Speaker 3: an underwater landslide around sixty two hundred BCE. After that,
Speaker 3: we talked about cases of alleged vanishing islands in the Pacific,
Speaker 3: including reasons for thinking that some of these accounts are genuine.
Speaker 3: One example that you brought up rob is the island
Speaker 3: of Tao Nimanu, a former island described in the oral
Speaker 3: traditions of some of the Solomon Islanders, which allegedly sank
Speaker 3: beneath the waves in a rapid seismic event, so that
Speaker 3: this happened suddenly and some people barely escaped in canoes.
Speaker 3: And according to the sources we were looking at last time,
Speaker 3: it is thought that this probably did actually happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that seems to be the consensus.
Speaker 3: Though there are of course many other examples of alleged
Speaker 3: vanishing islands, being more likely just cases of mistaken identification.
Speaker 3: In the first instance, probably we discussed reasons for possibly
Speaker 3: mistakings thing for an island, maybe visual illusions like Fata Morgana,
Speaker 3: or being mistaken about where you are when you see
Speaker 3: an actual island, or mistaking patches of things floating in
Speaker 3: the water for land. One example we talked about was seaweed,
Speaker 3: another was volcanic pummice rafts, and then everybody's favorite, the
Speaker 3: possibility that somebody could mistake white oily scum left over
Speaker 3: after seasonal worm sex as some indication of a land mass.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely in the mix.
Speaker 3: Now I wanted to talk about another example of a
Speaker 3: quite real sunken land that we have tons of evidence for.
Speaker 3: Many people were probably thinking about it when we were
Speaker 3: talking about dogger Land, because this is perhaps at least
Speaker 3: to north Americans the even more famous sunken Land bridge
Speaker 3: between two continental masses, and that would be the submerged
Speaker 3: plains of Beringia. This refers to an area of the
Speaker 3: globe between northwestern North America, including Alaska and north west
Speaker 3: Canada on one side, and northeastern Russia on the other.
Speaker 3: And it is now thought that during the Late Pleistocene,
Speaker 3: so the Last Ice Age, huge expanses of what are
Speaker 3: now the Bearing Sea, the Bearing Straight and the Chuckchi
Speaker 3: Sea were lands exposed by dropping sea levels. So the
Speaker 3: geological story of Beringia has some things in common with
Speaker 3: the story of Doggerland, which we talked about previously. The
Speaker 3: lower sea levels of the Pleistocene were associated with massive
Speaker 3: glacier formation. During the last glacial maximum, roughly twenty thousand
Speaker 3: years ago, about twenty five percent of the Earth's land
Speaker 3: surface and about eight percent of its total surface was
Speaker 3: covered in ice, and global sea level was like four
Speaker 3: hundred feet lower than it is today. It's hard to
Speaker 3: imagine the amount of ice unless maybe you have been
Speaker 3: to Antarctica or something. Yeah, And at that time, much
Speaker 3: of North America, basically almost all of the current area
Speaker 3: of Canada, especially east of the rocky mountains, but reaching
Speaker 3: as far south as Ohio and Indiana in the United States.
Speaker 3: All of that was covered in an ice formation known
Speaker 3: as the Laurentide ice Sheet, which at its greatest extent
Speaker 3: was more than thirteen million square kilometers and at its thickest,
Speaker 3: probably near the middle, may have been up to three
Speaker 3: thousand meters tall, which is almost two miles high of ice.
Speaker 3: It's kind of hard to imagine. Again, and during this
Speaker 3: time of lower sea levels, it has long been thought
Speaker 3: that the much of the exposed land of Beringia probably
Speaker 3: was some kind of step tundra environment, a sort of cold,
Speaker 3: arid grassland. But at the end of the Pleistocene, roughly
Speaker 3: ten to twelve thousand years ago, the earth began to warm,
Speaker 3: ice melted, and sea levels rose. And these were the trends,
Speaker 3: of course that eventually covered doggerland and water, and the
Speaker 3: same happened to the exposed lands of Beringia. Now there
Speaker 3: is no land bridge connecting North America to Asia, but
Speaker 3: at the time there was, it served as an important
Speaker 3: corridor of exchange between the continents, with evidence showing that plants, animals,
Speaker 3: and people spread through and across it. Now a lot
Speaker 3: of people probably know that the Beringia land Bridge plays
Speaker 3: a role in several of the current competing major theories
Speaker 3: of how people came to occupy the Americas, though there
Speaker 3: are of course competing explanations even within that space. For example,
Speaker 3: the question of whether the first people to come to
Speaker 3: North America traveled by land and found a way south
Speaker 3: through an ice free inland corridor, and if they did
Speaker 3: that at what time, or whether those people migrated along
Speaker 3: the coastline of Beringia mostly traveling by boat, surviving along
Speaker 3: the way with the help of kelp forests and other
Speaker 3: coastal resources. So there are still lots of open questions
Speaker 3: in that debate.
Speaker 2: But we know this was the corridor for the exchange
Speaker 2: of many different species, and we've discussed some examples of
Speaker 2: this on the show before, ranging from you know, of course,
Speaker 2: human beings, to also things like species of camel.
Speaker 3: And other things that I didn't even think about until
Speaker 3: I was reading for this episode, like the gray Wolf,
Speaker 3: the exchange of the wolf. Yeah, Now, an interesting thing
Speaker 3: I was thinking about was a similarity with dogger Land.
Speaker 3: As we mentioned with dogger Land, the phrase land bridge
Speaker 3: can potentially be deceptive. On one hand, it does sort
Speaker 3: of accurately describe what happens when sea levels drop and
Speaker 3: a ground corridor is established between two land masses that
Speaker 3: used to be and or would later be separated by water.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, the term bridge kind of creates
Speaker 3: the impression of a transitional space that one merely crosses
Speaker 3: to get from one's to the other. Like you don't
Speaker 3: build a house in the middle of a bridge. Well,
Speaker 3: I guess you might if it's one of those bridges
Speaker 3: with all buildings on it in Italy or France or wherever.
Speaker 3: But but you know what I mean, most of the time,
Speaker 3: you don't set up camp in the middle of a bridge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think this is this is
Speaker 2: this is a concept that always kind of comes to
Speaker 2: mind whenever I'm reading about land bridges. On some level,
Speaker 2: you're imagining it as a situation where like the wolves
Speaker 2: and the camels are like, hey, guys, there's a temporary
Speaker 2: passage between these two land masses. Let's all go get
Speaker 2: at it, and you know, everybody rushes to get from
Speaker 2: one side to the other, and then the land bridge
Speaker 2: goes away.
Speaker 3: Right, So that can be kind of deceptive. In the
Speaker 3: case of dogger Land, we know that not only was
Speaker 3: the now flooded land inhabited by Neanderthals and later Mesolithic
Speaker 3: Homo sapiens during its brief warm period, for the few
Speaker 3: thousand years between the end of the Pleistocene and the
Speaker 3: time it was under the water, it was probably one
Speaker 3: of the most resource abundant places in Europe, and as
Speaker 3: I said Earl, it may have been one of the
Speaker 3: most densely populated as well. So with that in mind,
Speaker 3: to what extent could we also think of Beringia more
Speaker 3: as a destination in itself, a place to be, rather
Speaker 3: than just a way to get somewhere. Well, In fact,
Speaker 3: we know that it was a habitat environment for many
Speaker 3: terrestrial plants and animals, and so the real question is
Speaker 3: to what extent this would be true for people as well.
Speaker 3: So I came across one paper from twenty fourteen raising
Speaker 3: a few lines of evidence for thinking that the large
Speaker 3: now submerged plane in the middle of the Bearing Land
Speaker 3: Bridge was actually a relatively habitable refuge for plants, animals,
Speaker 3: and people during the last glacial maximum, and may have
Speaker 3: been home to an isolated population of Native American ancestors
Speaker 3: for thousands of years. So the paper is called out
Speaker 3: of Beringia question Mark, published in the journal Science in
Speaker 3: twenty fourteen by Hafak, Elias and O'Rourke, and one of
Speaker 3: the core pieces of evidence here is a sampling of
Speaker 3: mitochondrial DNA from more than six hundred Native American people
Speaker 3: in the present, most of whom shared unique mitochondrial DNA
Speaker 3: mutations not shared by their closest relatives in Asia, indicating
Speaker 3: that most likely they can trace their ancestry back to
Speaker 3: a group of people that was living isolated from people
Speaker 3: in the rest of Asia for thousands of years, perhaps
Speaker 3: ten thousand years or so, before spreading across the continents
Speaker 3: of North and South America. And if this is in
Speaker 3: fact the case, where would this population of people be living,
Speaker 3: perhaps in a region of Beringia that supported long term settlement.
Speaker 3: Now you might think, but wait a minute, it wasn't
Speaker 3: Beringia too cold and arid and free of resources. Not
Speaker 3: necessarily palaeoecological evidence is showing that parts of central Beringia
Speaker 3: may have actually been more rich and plant and animal
Speaker 3: resources that would potentially support continued human habitation. And this
Speaker 3: evidence includes things cited by these authors like sediment cores
Speaker 3: that you would take from the bottom of the bering Sea.
Speaker 3: So you like core out an area of the sediment
Speaker 3: strata there and see what's in it. And it turns
Speaker 3: out these sediment samples contain remnants of pollen and other
Speaker 3: plant matter and insects that indicate that while outer regions
Speaker 3: of Beringia may have been more inhospitable and arid, very
Speaker 3: like dry cold step lands, the central lowlands of Beringia
Speaker 3: may very well have had plenty of animal populations for
Speaker 3: hunting and especially important woody plants which could have been
Speaker 3: used as fuel for fires. And as we know, wood
Speaker 3: is a big deal there there was not a whole
Speaker 3: lot of wood available in the Arctic at the time
Speaker 3: due to the extent the extent of the glaciers, and
Speaker 3: fuel for fire can make the difference between a place
Speaker 3: being able to sustain human life or not.
Speaker 2: So already we're painting an entirely different picture of a
Speaker 2: quote unquote land bridge than I think a lot of
Speaker 2: us might have had in our head.
Speaker 3: Right so to quote lead author John Hoffecker, who is
Speaker 3: a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, speaking to
Speaker 3: Live Science, he said, quote the central part of Beringia
Speaker 3: was probably the mildest, most comfortable place to live at
Speaker 3: high latitudes during the last glacial maximum. It is the
Speaker 3: most logical place for a group of people to hunker down,
Speaker 3: and the term used for this area is a glacial refugium,
Speaker 3: a place where organisms can survive despite hostile conditions in
Speaker 3: the surrounding areas. So this might have been a sort
Speaker 3: of warmer, milder, wetter area in the middle of very cold, dry,
Speaker 3: or glaciated areas that would be able to maintain all
Speaker 3: of this diversity of species like shrub tree that you
Speaker 3: could burn for wood, and animals that could sustain human hunting,
Speaker 3: and possibly people living there for thousands of years. So
Speaker 3: the idea of many millennia of people living isolated in
Speaker 3: this refugium is sometimes referred to as the Bringian stand
Speaker 3: still hypothesis. And though it's not meant to I feel
Speaker 3: like this is another one where the word choice brings
Speaker 3: some of the wrong connotations, because stand still kind of
Speaker 3: like bridge it to me, at least, it implies a
Speaker 3: connotation that like, these people would have been trying to
Speaker 3: get somewhere and then they were stalled or delayed, rather
Speaker 3: than this is simply where and how people were living
Speaker 3: their lives just like anywhere else on earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah again, because you're talking about thousands of years here,
Speaker 2: You're not talking about again, this brief opportunity to move
Speaker 2: from point A to point B. It is instead the
Speaker 2: emergence of a point C. At least, I feel like
Speaker 2: the historical perspective we have often leads to misconceptions like this,
Speaker 2: Like when you look back through history, we know or
Speaker 2: simply have an idea, right or wrong, of what happened
Speaker 2: before and after a period of time. And with that
Speaker 2: historical perspective, I think we often have a hard time
Speaker 2: understanding that people within that period probably did not think
Speaker 2: of themselves as transitional between two things, but were trying
Speaker 2: to live their lives like anyone else. And you know,
Speaker 2: I was having the same pattern of thoughts about Doggerland,
Speaker 2: like we now know that it was really only this
Speaker 2: lush buffet of a world for a few thousand years
Speaker 2: in Doggerland, But to the people living there it was
Speaker 2: it was probably just home, right, Yeah, I mean to
Speaker 2: your point, like this was to them, to them, this
Speaker 2: was the world. You know. They not to discount the
Speaker 2: possibility that they had some oral traditions or so forth
Speaker 2: of the places they came from or the world before.
Speaker 2: But you know it'skew. You know, hindsight is twenty twenty
Speaker 2: and that certainly applies to our understanding of history.
Speaker 3: I guess the other way of looking at it is
Speaker 3: that on a on a long enough timescale, all people
Speaker 3: living in all places at all times are living in
Speaker 3: transitional points.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's interesting to think about because it kind of
Speaker 2: comes back to what we discussed in previous episodes about
Speaker 2: golden ages, lost golden ages, the thing that we're trying
Speaker 2: to reclaim or trying to find again. You know, that
Speaker 2: also kind of loses side of the fact that life
Speaker 2: is continually a state of change and there it's always
Speaker 2: in a state of transition, and you know, it reminds me.
Speaker 2: I forget what talk this was, but there was a
Speaker 2: talk that Terrence McKenna gave where he used the line
Speaker 2: and if something needs to be done, you will find
Speaker 2: yourself doing it, which I think I forget the exact
Speaker 2: context of it, but you know, it kind of speaks
Speaker 2: to to how human beings have survived and grown and
Speaker 2: expanded so much over the course of their existence. They
Speaker 2: have expanded into new areas, they have left areas, they
Speaker 2: have changed, they have rolled with the punches of transition.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, you know, created these stories
Speaker 2: and looked back longingly at supposed better times, whether or
Speaker 2: not they were actually better.
Speaker 3: That's a good point. But to come back to the
Speaker 3: Barringian standstill hypothesis, it is important to remember that this
Speaker 3: is just a hypothesis. Like it would need more direct
Speaker 3: evidence in its favor, such as especially archaeological discoveries, which
Speaker 3: had not been found at the time this article was published,
Speaker 3: and I looked around and couldn't find any evidence of
Speaker 3: archaeological discoveries backing it up since then, and critics of
Speaker 3: this hypothesis argue that not only do we not have
Speaker 3: archaeological evidence, we probably should expect to have found some
Speaker 3: by now, since not all all of this territory is underwater,
Speaker 3: though a lot of it is. But either way so
Speaker 3: we don't know. This is an idea, it may or
Speaker 3: may not be correct. But if this idea is correct,
Speaker 3: once the surrounding glaciers began to melt, the ideas that
Speaker 3: the Beringian people probably expanded their territory and then moved
Speaker 3: on down the coastline and into the interior of the
Speaker 3: North American continent and spread on from there. But the
Speaker 3: ultimate point about the land being that much like Doggerland,
Speaker 3: this is an area that was land when the glaciers
Speaker 3: were at their peak, when the water was locked in
Speaker 3: the ice, and so there were these vast stretches of
Speaker 3: plains that are now buried beneath the sea. And there's
Speaker 3: probably a lot more that we could know about them
Speaker 3: more easily if it were not underneath the sea, and
Speaker 3: we could, you know, just go around and do digs
Speaker 3: and look for palaeontological remains, you know, animal remains, plant remains,
Speaker 3: and see if we could find human tools and remains
Speaker 3: what people were doing in these places. But it's again
Speaker 3: more challenging because of the water covering things.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, well that's fascinating Again. That kind of essentially
Speaker 2: kind of turns over the loose idea that I had
Speaker 2: in my head of land bridges. So this might be
Speaker 2: an interesting general topic to come back to in the future. Now,
Speaker 2: in all this talk of sunken lands and lost islands
Speaker 2: in particular that we got into in the last episode,
Speaker 2: I thought it might be fun to explore something that
Speaker 2: lines up with this concept in a unique way and
Speaker 2: that is the topic of atolls or atolls you apparently
Speaker 2: can say it both ways, and hey, I might just
Speaker 2: say it both ways. This we proceed here. So these
Speaker 2: are essentially coral reefs in circling a lagoon. They're not
Speaker 2: always circular, but there are some stunning examples of circular atolls.
Speaker 2: And you've you've probably seen pictures of these. There are
Speaker 2: numerous examples of them. The big Blue Hole Belize is
Speaker 2: one that is commonly mentioned and commonly photographed. But it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you have this circular reef islands and then in the
Speaker 2: middle more water. So it looks like, you know, this
Speaker 2: looks like something is missing, right, And this has certainly
Speaker 2: invited curiosity over the many years here as long as
Speaker 2: people have been encountering them, because it raises the question
Speaker 2: how did they form? This was actually a question that
Speaker 2: none other than Charles Darwin considered on the voyage of
Speaker 2: the Ahms Beagle during the eighteen thirties. So when I
Speaker 2: was reading about that, I had to pull open his book,
Speaker 2: The Voyage of the Beagle, And yeah, he gets into
Speaker 2: this at one point and he writes about some of
Speaker 2: the theories of the day that he was less convinced
Speaker 2: by So the first idea he brings up is that
Speaker 2: quote coral bil building animals instinctively built up their great
Speaker 2: circles to afford themselves protection in the inner parts. So
Speaker 2: that would seem to imply that, yeah, you have coral
Speaker 2: is like growing up from the seabed and building a
Speaker 2: great ring so that they can have like a protected
Speaker 2: area in the middle. And on this theory, he points
Speaker 2: out that, Okay, coral don't thrive within the atl lagoon,
Speaker 2: and this would be a case in which quote many
Speaker 2: species of distinct genera and families are supposed to combine
Speaker 2: for one end, and of such a combination not a
Speaker 2: single instance can be found in the whole of nature.
Speaker 3: M Okay, so the creatures forming the reef would have
Speaker 3: to be all working together to protect this inner area.
Speaker 3: But also he points out, like, you don't really see
Speaker 3: the coral doing much in the inner area. It's not
Speaker 3: like they're, oh, that's the place where they keep all
Speaker 3: their soft parts. They're just not really in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then additionally, where else in the natural world
Speaker 2: do we see this kind of like cross genera cooperation
Speaker 2: going on. I mean, I guess you could you know,
Speaker 2: there's some little instances here and there where you talk
Speaker 2: about it, you know, prey animal communication and alerting, you know,
Speaker 2: generally to the idea of predators in their myths, But
Speaker 2: something a lot on the scale of this, he argues,
Speaker 2: we don't.
Speaker 3: Really see it, okay.
Speaker 2: The next theory he mentions is that atolls are based
Speaker 2: on submarine craters, and he points out that this doesn't
Speaker 2: hold up when you look at all the examples in
Speaker 2: the world that were known at the time. It just
Speaker 2: simply doesn't account for everything. Another idea that he explores
Speaker 2: is the idea that coral edges were exposed to the
Speaker 2: outer sea and along these edges grew up more quickly.
Speaker 2: But as with theory one, the question remains, what did
Speaker 2: they grow on? He stresses that rebuilding corals cannot live
Speaker 2: at great depth, and therefore, like what would grow up
Speaker 2: then to be doesn't make sense that they would they
Speaker 2: would start deep down and then grow up because we
Speaker 2: know that these corals that live near the surface don't
Speaker 2: in the deep water, right.
Speaker 3: So it's only in the shallow. Living corals only live
Speaker 3: in these areas that are already shallow for some reason,
Speaker 3: Like it's like it's almost an island right right.
Speaker 2: And it's worth noting that there are deep water corals,
Speaker 2: and they do produce deep sea reefs, but it's structurally different, apparently.
Speaker 2: So he writes at fair length about all of this
Speaker 2: and about what he thinks is happening. And here's a
Speaker 2: section that more or less encapsulates it. Quote, as the
Speaker 2: barrier reef slowly sinks down, the corals will go on
Speaker 2: vigorously growing upwards. But as the island sinks, this would
Speaker 2: be the island around which the reef is formed. He continues,
Speaker 2: The water will gain inch by inch on the shore,
Speaker 2: the separate mountains first forming separate islands within one great reef,
Speaker 2: and finally the last and highest pinnacle disappearing. The instant
Speaker 2: this takes place, a perfect atoll is formed. I have said,
Speaker 2: removed the high land from within the an encircling barrier reef,
Speaker 2: and an atoll is left. And the land has been removed.
Speaker 2: We can now perceive how it comes that atolls, having
Speaker 2: sprung from encircling barrier reefs, resemble them in general size form,
Speaker 2: in the manner in which they are coupled together, and
Speaker 2: in their arrangement in single or double lines. For they
Speaker 2: may be called rude outlined charts of the sunken islands
Speaker 2: over which they stand.
Speaker 3: M okay. So the idea there would be a volcanic
Speaker 3: island that forms, it gradually begins to sink, but as
Speaker 3: it is sinking, the barrier reef is built up to
Speaker 3: encircle it in the shallow water around it, and that
Speaker 3: height comes up as the central island just continues to
Speaker 3: go down. So an atoll, to come back to the
Speaker 3: idea of sort of transitional landforms, is somewhere in between
Speaker 3: a volcanic island and eventually fully sunken island.
Speaker 2: Right. And in this case, yeah, the volcanic island is
Speaker 2: no longer active and it is falling away. Meanwhile the
Speaker 2: coral is alive and it's building up.
Speaker 3: Hm. That makes sense, was he right?
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting so that this is generally referred to
Speaker 2: as the subsistence model, and it does. It seems like
Speaker 2: it's very much in the mix today. You certainly see
Speaker 2: it sided all over the place, and it pops up
Speaker 2: in textbooks and so forth. But not everyone loves it.
Speaker 2: And there are some very vocal experts who who say
Speaker 2: this is really this really doesn't explain everything, and we
Speaker 2: ultimately need to look maybe more at another theory, or
Speaker 2: ultimately look at sort of a host of theories, and
Speaker 2: that maybe we should get away from the idea that
Speaker 2: one theory in general is going to explain every formation
Speaker 2: like this that we find in the world's oceans. There's
Speaker 2: another key formation theory called the antecedent Karst model, and
Speaker 2: this one proposes that dropping sea levels that this has
Speaker 2: to do with like cyclical changes sea level over time.
Speaker 2: It proposes that dropping sea levels expose the top of
Speaker 2: a flat topped bank of carbonate rocks. And then while
Speaker 2: this is exposed again for you know, like with our
Speaker 2: land Bridge model, not for just a couple of days,
Speaker 2: but for an extended period of time, rain water steadily
Speaker 2: pools in the flat topped bank and dissolves some of
Speaker 2: the carbonate, forming a depression. Eventually, sea levels rise again
Speaker 2: and fresh coral builds up top this raised circular edge.
Speaker 2: Again roughly speaking, it doesn't have to be anything remotely
Speaker 2: resembling a perfect circle, but then the coral builds up
Speaker 2: on this raised circular edge of the depression. This forms
Speaker 2: the atoll according to this theory. So again it has
Speaker 2: a lot to do with cyclical changes in sea level.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so much. Kind of like how a cave
Speaker 3: is formed in limestone by like rain water coming down
Speaker 3: or you know, water rushing through and dissolving some of
Speaker 3: the sediment rock and eventually forming a cave. Here, the
Speaker 3: idea would be that in the times, when a seamount
Speaker 3: or island top is exposed by lowering sea levels, the
Speaker 3: rainwater comes down and sort of it dissolves it in
Speaker 3: kind of the same way that rainwater dissolves a cave cavity,
Speaker 3: and it lowers the central area of the island. But
Speaker 3: of course the coral is still building up the reef
Speaker 3: all around that central raised area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my understanding of this. Alexander Witz wrote a
Speaker 2: great article about the antecedent cars model back in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one for Noble magazine and was then reprinted on Smithsonian,
Speaker 2: where you can also find it. So I was reading
Speaker 2: about that here, and the author makes several key points
Speaker 2: that I wanted to draw out for this discussion. First
Speaker 2: of all, the author writes that experts that generally agree
Speaker 2: that Darwin got it wrong with his theory, they also
Speaker 2: admit that he crafted a very insightful theory for the
Speaker 2: day given in the limited amount of data. Also, some
Speaker 2: reefs may have still formed via the method that Darwin
Speaker 2: is describing here, such as some atolls found in Tahiti.
Speaker 2: And in any case, they often stress that we shouldn't
Speaker 2: look maybe for one unifying theory for atoll formation, because
Speaker 2: there may ultimately be a handful of explanations in the mix,
Speaker 2: including things like tectonic forces and wave action.
Speaker 3: Ah, that's a good point. Yeah, there could be multiple
Speaker 3: mechanisms creating similar looking formations.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The author also points out that understanding the varying
Speaker 2: reasons in play also helps us to understand which atolls
Speaker 2: are most at risk from climate change and rising sea levels.
Speaker 2: The author writes, quote, in the absence of humans, atolls
Speaker 2: can grow at a rate much faster than that of
Speaker 2: sea level rise. But people have degraded natural atolls by
Speaker 2: introducing pollution and waste, altering the water table, and adding
Speaker 2: concrete and asphalt that smothers the underlying coral. The Maldives
Speaker 2: in the Indian Ocean face a future of flooding, water contamination,
Speaker 2: and erosion that threaten its tourism and fishery industries. The Maldives,
Speaker 2: by the way, according to the article may have formed
Speaker 2: more due to the action of waves wave based erosion
Speaker 2: than by the clarsification theory was that I was talking
Speaker 2: about earlier, at least according to one study. But to
Speaker 2: come back to just the topic of sunken lands and
Speaker 2: sunken islands in general, yeah, I think atolls fit into
Speaker 2: the concept. Though. The added discussion and or disagreement concerns
Speaker 2: exactly how central exposed land masses may have formed and
Speaker 2: or fallen away, and you know, to what extent it
Speaker 2: involves things essentially, you know, rising from the ocean or
Speaker 2: then sinking back below the depths. Because both Darwin and
Speaker 2: the carciification theories entail a central exposed land mass or
Speaker 2: island around which the coral builds.
Speaker 3: I mean, part of me would wonder if you could
Speaker 3: just to some extent tell the difference between these by
Speaker 3: looking at the kind of rock, because in Darwin's theory,
Speaker 3: for example, if the idea is that the island is
Speaker 3: volcanic in origin, wouldn't you be mainly looking at volcanic
Speaker 3: rock leftover in the middle, Whereas if it's a kars
Speaker 3: process you would be looking at sedimentary rock in the middle.
Speaker 3: Am I wrong about that?
Speaker 2: The article I said, it does go into more detail
Speaker 2: about this, and yeah, it's my understanding that a lot
Speaker 2: of what we know now it does hinge upon geologic
Speaker 2: evidence that we just that Darwin wasn't exposed to and
Speaker 2: did not have back in the day, And so we
Speaker 2: do know a lot more about what sorts of rocks
Speaker 2: are underlying any given land mass that we're discussing.
Speaker 3: So I guess if the karsification explanation has come more
Speaker 3: into favor, that would suggest that more often the coral
Speaker 3: atoll is found around a like a limestone formation rather
Speaker 3: than a volcanic rock formation.
Speaker 2: That would seem to be the case. But again, based
Speaker 2: on what I was reading, it sounds like it is
Speaker 2: maybe a suite of the theories that we might turn
Speaker 2: to as opposed to again one unifying theory for all
Speaker 2: of these atolls. Now, as we touched on during the
Speaker 2: first episode, I wanted to come back around to this
Speaker 2: because water levels don't only rise due to geologic events
Speaker 2: and storms and global warming. It also occurs when humans
Speaker 2: build dams to form artificial lakes. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 2: guess you could maybe make an argument for beavers as well,
Speaker 2: but especially humans. That's true, humans can pour concrete. But
Speaker 2: you know this allows humans to otherwise manipulate rivers and lakes,
Speaker 2: and it's worth stressing that in addition to hydroelectricity. And
Speaker 2: you'll know this if you've ever visited a dam and
Speaker 2: gone through like a you know the educational portion of
Speaker 2: the dam in addition to producing electricity. Another major reason
Speaker 2: for dams is to often detame rivers that periodically endanger
Speaker 2: neighboring and low lying areas. But in doing so, in
Speaker 2: creating lakes, we of course sometimes sink formerly inhabited lands,
Speaker 2: both ancient and modern. And of course this has taken
Speaker 2: place all over the world. There are so many examples
Speaker 2: that we could turn to, but I thought I might
Speaker 2: highlight some examples that stood out to me, and of
Speaker 2: course if any others come up, we may bring them
Speaker 2: up later and certainly and feel free to write in
Speaker 2: about examples that come to your mind. But one that
Speaker 2: is often mentioned is, of course the site of Abu
Speaker 2: Simbel in Egypt. This was an ancient rock cut temple
Speaker 2: complex near the current Egyptian Sudanese border, and it dates
Speaker 2: back to the thirteenth century bcee. This site was threatened
Speaker 2: by Lake Nasser. This is the Aswan Dam reservoir during
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, but in nineteen sixty eight it was
Speaker 2: actually really located to another site, so massive relocation effort
Speaker 2: to move everything to a higher elevation further away from
Speaker 2: the water. Another famous dam, of course, is the Three
Speaker 2: Gorgeous Dam in China, that also entailed a great deal
Speaker 2: of relocation from the area to be flooded in terms
Speaker 2: of like the lake that's going to build up, but
Speaker 2: also the river itself. And this also included something called
Speaker 2: White Crane Ridge. It's an archaeological site. The inscriptions here
Speaker 2: date back to the Tung dynasty and provide detailed water
Speaker 2: level records on the Yangzi River, some I think one
Speaker 2: two hundred years worth of data based on what I
Speaker 2: was reading. Some of the carvings were relocated, but others
Speaker 2: remain in a special underwater museum constructed prior to the flooding.
Speaker 2: So you apparently this is underneath the river, so you
Speaker 2: apparently take an escalator down from a facility by the
Speaker 2: river bank through some tunnels to reach the museum. WHOA
Speaker 2: Another example from China that I ran across is Lions
Speaker 2: City or Hieching in eastern China. It's an example of
Speaker 2: an Eastern Han dynasty city that is now under the
Speaker 2: waters of a man made lake. This is Thousand Island Lake.
Speaker 2: This was flooded in the mid twentieth century as well,
Speaker 2: when most of these projects are taking place around the world,
Speaker 2: and it has apparently become a tourism destination, at least
Speaker 2: for very experienced divers. I read that it's not really
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that casual divers are going down for,
Speaker 2: but experienced divers have sought this out, and you can
Speaker 2: find some images online of various sort of you know,
Speaker 2: haunting underwater remnants of this place.
Speaker 3: As a creature of East Tennessee, I grew up with
Speaker 3: a lot of consciousness of the idea of lands flooded
Speaker 3: by the creation of dams, specifically with TVA hydro Electric.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Tennessee Valley Authority a right, Yeah, things like
Speaker 2: Kentucky Lake. There are always a lot of you know these.
Speaker 2: Anytime you have a big lake like this, there's going
Speaker 2: to be some sort of a relocation effort that has
Speaker 2: to take place, and I feel like inevitably you're gonna
Speaker 2: have some things left behind beneath the water and on
Speaker 2: top of what's actually underneath the water, You're gonna have
Speaker 2: stories about what maybe underneath the water, you know, tales
Speaker 2: of lost towns and so forth.
Speaker 3: I think I used to have dreams when I was
Speaker 3: little of finding houses submerged underneath the lake.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And this sort of thing has been explored
Speaker 2: in media, pops up in the Coen Brothers or brother
Speaker 2: Where Art thou and so forth, And I think ultimately
Speaker 2: wherever you're listening to this show, you probably don't have
Speaker 2: to go too far to find an example of some
Speaker 2: sort of an artificial lake, and there may be stories
Speaker 2: about like the impact of creating that lake.
Speaker 3: Of course, you kind of alluded to this earlier. But
Speaker 3: one of the interesting things about the flooding of these
Speaker 3: river values by the creation of dams is that often
Speaker 3: one of the purposes of it is to prevent uncontrolled flooding.
Speaker 3: I know this is it's fundamentally changed what the Nile
Speaker 3: River valley is that they put all these dams in
Speaker 3: because there used to be this uncontrolled seasonal flooding of
Speaker 3: the Nile that was just part of life in Egypt.
Speaker 3: And now that in some ways the water level of
Speaker 3: the Nile has been to some degree broad under human control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so you see this sort of thing all over.
Speaker 2: I have to say, though, I wasn't familiar with this
Speaker 2: example un till I started doing research here. There's perhaps
Speaker 2: fewer examples, few examples that are as stunning as this.
Speaker 2: But there's a town in northern Italy, or a village
Speaker 2: in northern Italy by the name of Kuran, and it's
Speaker 2: apparently pretty famous for there a lot of images of this,
Speaker 2: but I wasn't familiar with it. But this is another
Speaker 2: case where they had to relocate the town to a
Speaker 2: higher elevation, as the original site was flooded in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty so most of the city was abandoned and demoed first,
Speaker 2: except for a lone fourteenth century church and its bell tower.
Speaker 2: The bell tower still sticks out of the water in
Speaker 2: rather surrealistic fashion. You'll find images of it where it's
Speaker 2: just like, oh, here's the mountains, there's a lake, and
Speaker 2: here is a bell tower sticking out of it. I mean,
Speaker 2: some of these images don't even look real. It looks
Speaker 2: like some sort of obvious photoshop, but it is. These
Speaker 2: are legitimate. There are other images of the lake frozen
Speaker 2: over and here is the bell tower emerging from the ice.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you see images where people have ventured out onto
Speaker 2: the ice close to it in.
Speaker 3: Some of the pictures. I just looked up pictures of it,
Speaker 3: and in a lot of them, there seems to be
Speaker 3: a color gradient on the tower as it sticks up,
Speaker 3: like the stone is a little paler for most of
Speaker 3: the way up, and then there will be a lower
Speaker 3: area where the stone is darker. And I don't know
Speaker 3: if this is the reason, but I wonder if that's
Speaker 3: you know, it's literally just from the water level going
Speaker 3: up and down, and so you can see where the
Speaker 3: water has been on the on the height of the stone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe that is the case. I've read that
Speaker 2: during the spring, when the water is at its lowest,
Speaker 2: you can apparently see more of the ruins. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I encourage everyone to look up in this because it's
Speaker 2: pretty impressive. And you can't have something in like this
Speaker 2: in the world, of course without it inspiring some level
Speaker 2: of superstition and in fiction. And sure enough, there is
Speaker 2: an Italian supernatural TV drama about this town, or at
Speaker 2: least I don't know if it's about the set in
Speaker 2: the town and invokes the idea of the town. It
Speaker 2: is called Kuron. It's apparently I think it's on Netflix.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's like, if that's in the States,
Speaker 2: or if that's just in Italy or other international markets.
Speaker 2: But c r in. If anyone out there has seen it,
Speaker 2: do write in and let us know. I'm wondering how
Speaker 2: they I mean, there's so many directions you can go in.
Speaker 2: You're talking about an abandoned underwater church, like that's perfect.
Speaker 3: Well, not to spoil the fun, but to be clear,
Speaker 3: I think they removed the church. It's just the tower
Speaker 3: that's there, right, or at least in the pictures I've seen.
Speaker 2: I'm uncertain about that. There may be some ruins down there.
Speaker 2: But then again, if you're making a supernatural drama TV show,
Speaker 2: why not have the church down there? You can have
Speaker 2: whatever you like down there. Merphult going to church, ghosts, raiths,
Speaker 2: I don't know. There's so many directions.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's like the pious undead that we talked about.
Speaker 3: Was it last year or the year before? All the
Speaker 3: revenants are going to church?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and there this is like a rich folkloric
Speaker 2: region of Europe too that we're talking about. So there's
Speaker 2: so many ideas you could pull in, you know, ideas
Speaker 2: that predate the creation of man made lakes for sure.
Speaker 2: I also want to point out worth looking up or
Speaker 2: images of the Quran coat of arms because I'm not
Speaker 2: I'm not sure on the exact history of this, like
Speaker 2: when they changed it or adapted it, but the coat
Speaker 2: of arms depicts the tower, the bell tower, emerging from
Speaker 2: the water. Mm hm, so pretty cool. If you have
Speaker 2: visited this location, right in and let us know, because
Speaker 2: I'd love to hear your first person account of this
Speaker 2: haunting bell tower. All right, we're going to gohead and
Speaker 2: leave it there, but yeah, go ahead and write in
Speaker 2: if you have any thoughts on anything we've discussed so
Speaker 2: far in this series. Just a reminder that Stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core
Speaker 2: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Mondays, usually
Speaker 2: in an artifact or monster fact episode on Wednesdays, and
Speaker 2: on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just
Speaker 2: talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If
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