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