From the Vault: The Sunken Lands, Part 2

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of lost islands and forgotten continents, in both actual geologic history and the mists of the human imagination. (Part 2 of 4, originally published 11/30/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Rob and I are out this week,
so we are going to be continuing our vault series
which began last Saturday on the Sunken Lands. So today's
episode is going to be part two of that series.
This originally published November thirtieth, twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Land, and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our series called the Sunken Lands, about
places where what was relatively recently dry land has now
vanished beneath the waters. Now, in the last episode, we
talked about the history of fascination with the idea of lands,

(01:03):
and especially human civilizations occupied lands that were swallowed by
the sea, the most famous of these stories, of course
being Atlantis, a probably originally fictional island civilization described by
Plato in some of his dialogues that was, according to
the story, punished for its hubris by being drowned in
the ocean. And even though most experts on the original

(01:26):
sources think this story probably did not refer to a
place existing in reality. There are still people all the
time who love to hunt for remains of Atlantis and
similar drowned empires, or to interpret any strange underwater imagery
or other phenomena or artifacts as evidence of such. Here's
a weird looking artifact from under the water. Maybe it's

(01:49):
from Atlantis.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, and in many cases it's harmless. But you know,
as we've been discussing, these kind of ideas can bleed
into pseudoscience, pseudo archaeology, and pseudo geology, and in some
of these areas are perhaps harmless as well, but they
can become increasingly less harmless depending on what form they

(02:13):
end up taking within a given culture. I guess I
would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous
nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been
discussing with the idea of lost islands, and there's going
to continue to be this kind of a morphous quality
to it as we proceed.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Right. So, despite the fact that hunting for a literal,
physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on,
there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where
land has relatively recently become covered in water and the
main real world example we talked about in the last
episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land,

(02:52):
a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and
north of the coastlines of Continental Europe, off the north
coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands,
occupying much of the area that is now filled in
with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about
some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence

(03:14):
that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such
as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide
on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently
ancient trees and trunks, still rooted in their original soil,
but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well

(03:35):
as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human
artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone Age spear tip
dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about
twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in
the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one, so today we're
back to talk more about the sunken lands, and I

(03:56):
wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Dogland in
more depth. So Doggerland used to be land. Now it's
covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going
to lay out a rough timeline here, and I just
want to mention at the top here a couple of
really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I

(04:17):
was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was
a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry
in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping a Vanished Landscape.
This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanas in the
March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline
goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part

(04:40):
of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred
and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much
of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the
North Sea was much lower than it is today. It
was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the
present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene,

(05:01):
Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step
occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses,
but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments,
like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle.

(05:24):
Then after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into
the geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up
until today. This is the warming period after the most
recent ice age. So this period is characterized by a
steady increase in temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt.

(05:45):
So for thousands of years, you know, to think back
roughly ten thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years,
doggerland was still above sea level, but the warming climate
and the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold, arid
step a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land

(06:07):
of forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many
sources describe this post glacial landscape as a kind of
hunter gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? Well,
there were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some
indication that the human relat the ancient human relative Homo

(06:28):
antecessor had existed in Doggerland going way back during the
cold arid Step period, the Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would
have been a harsh existence. This would be a very
cold and dry place where people would have survived by
hunting large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the dog Land Step.

(06:50):
We know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other
flint artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected
to a type of birch bark tar that the Neanderthals
would use that they manufactured. And then after the Neanderthals
during the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it

(07:12):
was clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And
the article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute
ago quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National
Museum of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says
quote during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but

(07:32):
with really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the
richest areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer,
wild boar, and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters,
and beavers. It was a Garden of Eden for them,
a wetland wonderland. So if you were a hunter gatherer

(07:53):
in Mesolithic Europe, especially after the glaciers began to melt
and the climate began to warm, dog ker Land was awesome.
Jason Urbanis, writing this article, says that it is quote
by any estimation, the most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe
for Mesolithic hunter gatherers, and perhaps the continent's most densely

(08:15):
populated region at the time. So sometimes when you think
about a previously exposed piece of land that is in
many sources referred to as quote a land bridge, because
it is what bridged the mainland continental Europe with Great Britain,
you think of a kind of transitional place, you know
that people just walked across. But no, it's not just

(08:38):
a transitional place that allowed people to get from one
highland to another. This was apparently about the best place
you could be in this area of Europe at the time.
It was full of resources.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
This is also amazing that he directly compares it to
the Garden of Eden. That he compares it to not
only a land of plenty but a utope which lines
up with so many of these ideas of a lost
and or sunken land, of a land from which people
came but can no longer return to or may one

(09:12):
day return to. But in this case it does seem
to line up with the idea of it actually being
a land of plenty, actually being a place where resources
were abundant, but.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever.
Though in this case it apparently has nothing to do
with a snake. It has to do with in fact,
the exact same forces that made it a land of
plenty in abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it.
So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed dogger
Land from an arid tundra into a lush paradise, and

(09:46):
then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone
Age graveyard it is today.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
So from the end of the Last Ice Age, the
level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting,
the world is warm, the sea levels arising, and Urbanis
writes in the Archaeology article that for a period of
roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet every
hundred years and then adding to the steady creep up

(10:15):
of the water line, there was a sudden cataclysmic event
that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in
the remaining coastal areas of that region, towards the end
of that warming period, so more than eight thousand years ago,
around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point, much

(10:36):
of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was left
above the water line was hit with a catastrophic tsunami
caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway.
It was actually one of a series of these underwater
land slide events known as the Storega slides str GGA.
And I've seen different estimates for the exact height and

(10:59):
power of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in
Science by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least
ten meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but
a twenty twenty one study of its effects on the
eastern coast of Scotland, so this is looking at Scotland
analyzed soil deposits to estimate that the water might have

(11:19):
come as far as eighteen miles inland.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Wow. Well, I mean even just looking at the like
the ten meter high, that would be almost thirty three
feet high.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Right, So, if you are in range of the tsunami,
catastrophic event also may have had some effect in like
moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas
of land.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Right. Right, that again we're already exposed due to the
rising the sea levels.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
Right. And actually one of the last pieces of land
remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger
Bank from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as
an island for a while, so Doggerland came to be
known as Doggerland when the name was given to it

(12:06):
by an archaeologist named Briany Coles. And it was named
after the sand bank in the North Sea known as
the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was
a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers.
So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the
sand bank. There's good catch there, and those doggers give

(12:27):
their name to the area. And apparently that that sand
bank was once an island, that was one of the
last parts of it left. Now, there's an interesting contradiction
which is that we know that it was probably one
of the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe.
It was full of abundant resources. There were lots of
humans living there in the Middle Stone Age. But it's

(12:50):
hard to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just
go dig. It's underwater, and also the water is deep
and cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult
place to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists
learn things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the

(13:12):
occasional artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net
like we talked about with the Colinda Harpoon. Well, actually,
this is one of the main subjects of that article
in Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis,
and it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have
come up with or come across by accident to study

(13:34):
Doggerland and see what we can learn about it. So
one effort described in this article is associated with a
University of Bradford archaeologist named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney
is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about
how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys

(13:56):
originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find
mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you
have a ship, it goes out in the water. It
emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of
the seafloor and then are picked up by ship based detectors.
And the physical features of the seafloor affect how the
sound is altered when it bounces back, and then this

(14:18):
information can be used to map shapes and contours and
anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out that
that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it was
owned by these energy companies, how that could be used
by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what Doggerland
was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape.

(14:41):
And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from
I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum
Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they use
data from this company to map a patch of sea
roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when
they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at

(15:03):
a place where a large river had once cut through
what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine
that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and
then you realize it's showing you a map of what
the land looked like before the water covered it, and
you can see the river bed and all that.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
And at the time of this article, their maps had
expanded to cover more than seventeen thousand square miles, so
they know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland
than we did in the past. They have maps depicting
a lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills and valleys. So
that's one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project.

(15:44):
But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of
these articles, which is that, of course, many more Mesolithic
artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colinda Harpoon.
There are lots of them now, especially a lot of
these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot of
them have been found as an accidental byproduct of beach

(16:07):
fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense,
to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from
rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So
basically you have these big boats that go out and
dredge up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom
miles off shore, and then they come back and they

(16:29):
dump it at the water's edge to expand the existing
land footprint, maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something,
or to fix roading coastline, or to build up a
sand barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater.
And it just so happens that when they do this,
when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they

(16:52):
often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on
the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors.
And these articles describe archaeologists who are like in contact
with these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're
just getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people
are writing them to say, oh, here they've got arrowheads, axes,

(17:15):
barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like
the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler
of a red deer, and there's a lot we can
learn from this stuff because the low oxygen soil deposits
at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve
organic materials very well. So the researchers have been able
to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains,

(17:37):
including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods, and
this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more
than we used to. The downside, of course, is that
if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains
that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where
they're dredged from the ocean floor and then spit out

(17:59):
on a beach somewhere, where you know nothing about the
context really. I mean, you might have some rough ideas
about where it comes from, but archaeologists want not just
an artifact, but they want to understand the context of
the artifact, what soil did it come from, where exactly
was that located, what was the situation in which this

(18:19):
artifact would have originally been deposited.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
So we're kind of like robbing future archaeologists who might
have clearer maps and therefore a little better idea about
where to search for such artifacts in these sunken lands,
and also better means of actually investigating these sites and
exploring them in a way that retains some level of

(18:44):
context about the remains.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
That's right, and so the archaeologists described in these articles
have actually in some cases been able to identify artifacts
in their original context. So one question it asks is, Okay,
so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable
location during this warming period, for the few thousand years

(19:07):
that it was warming and wet but not yet submerged.
So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding
the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they
say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic,
but if there was a sheet with you know, if
there was a great abundance of resources, they might create

(19:30):
semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for
those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on
like high ground, close to wetland areas. So the wetlands
would have resources that you would want, but you would
want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going to
read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology Magazine

(19:51):
describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify an
underwater site with the help of this mapping, and then
extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand more
about the original context. One of these sites, quote was
a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as Brown Bank,

(20:11):
where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a thirteen thousand
year old engraved aurex bone, had been snared by fishing
trawlers in the past. The other was an area along
a now submerged river channel and estuary off the Norfolk
Coast known as the Southern River. Although the weather did
not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short,

(20:33):
they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the
Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they
were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a
stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty
amazed by that. The idea that they could use these
maps to find sites at the bottom of the North

(20:53):
Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because
of the value of those sites compared to the natural
resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from
under the water and actually find human artifacts where they
expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so
the article goes on to say that while this individual

(21:14):
find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the
fact that this technique generally works for could or generally
could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach
us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland.

(21:38):
Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this
is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from
January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note,
the dateline on this report is from a place in
the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster,

(21:58):
which is near a beach that had been constructed via
the sand motor process that I was talking about. So
a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be
found on the beach there and are found by people
walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a
lot of the same ground as the other one I
was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, Okay,

(22:19):
we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available
from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people
did in response to these steadily rising sea levels, And
there actually has been some research on this that they
of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland
from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland

(22:43):
with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and
then scattered highlands which stayed drier. And analysis of human
bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in
what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparent
currently shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish.

(23:06):
And then one last little fact I wanted to mention
that I came across. This was in an article by
Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological
Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid
osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggarland.
The fact was sort of contained in the title there.

(23:27):
We have already talked about how a lot of these
sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people
who lived here were made of antler and bone. These
are primarily animal bones. Of course, you know, so they
might be using parts of a deer carcass or something
like that to make a lot of these weapons. But
apparently the authors of this study report at least two
barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made

(23:50):
out of human bone.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
That's fascinating and it makes one wonder, you know, what
could have been the context for that. Was it a
matter of of some sort of a supply shortage with
you know, deer or elkbones. Was it maybe something that
was ritualistic, Was this, you know, the way to honor
ancestors or you know, or was it just hey, we
need more bone and we have some human bones on hand.

(24:15):
Were these enemies? Were these friends? So many questions.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail
like that. You think like, is this was this a
question of efficiency or question of choice?

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah? Well, this whole discussion of Doggerland has been fascinating.
I really wasn't familiar with this this topic at all.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, I was not really either. I mean reading about Doggerland,
including some of the articles I've talked about today, is
sort of what made me want to discuss it in
the context of this broader subject of submerged lands, and
of course it is not the only one that's right.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
I want to come back to the topic of lost
islands that we touched on briefly in the last episode.
I was reading about the topic in a book titled
Lost Islands. The Story of Islands that Have Vanished from
Nautical Charts by Henry Stommel. This this is a really,
really fun book. He spends a lot of time just
talking about like why why people are just so fascinated
with islands in general. It talks about like just the

(25:12):
idea of an island is attractive to us. You know,
it's kind of like this this miniature world that we
can comprehend in our head and so therefore real and
you know, definitely real islands, existing islands are of great
interest to us, and the idea of lost islands as well.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
This is only half formed, but I feel like we
are attracted to stories that are set in the location
with clear boundaries. Like we like stories that are set
in a particular house. You know, there's like a haunted mansion,
and we just know the stories about that mansion. It's there,
and the island is kind of the same way, you know,
It's like it's got a clear boundary. It's surrounded by water,

(25:48):
so we have an idea of the setting that is
fully contained.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, and they often do. You know, we've talked about
the island ecosystems before. You know, you'll you'll often encounter
a situation where an island feels like a continent made small.
You know, you'll have that diversity. You'll have the dry
arid lands, you'll have the rainforest, even snow tipped mountains
in some cases, and you'll have it all in just

(26:15):
such a tight and contained space relatively speaking. Now, the
author of this book, Stonewall, points out that nineteenth century
nautical charts feature a good two hundred islands that we
know now just don't exist, and he writes that most
of these were situations of poor location determination and or
reporting errors. So, in one example, nineteenth century cartographers ended

(26:38):
up including Gang's Island in the Pacific, apparently as a
concession to various reports of a reef or an island
at its sighted coordinates. So you know, you'd imagine the
situation where the map makers are like, Okay, well, some
people are saying there's something there. Some people were not.
Let's just go ahead and include it. You know, maybe
it's a situation where it's just safer to say, Okay,
we'll put it on there. But by thirty three it

(27:00):
was clear that there was nothing there.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
That raises an interesting question. If you have ambiguous evidence,
I'll say, your evidence, you think it's like fifty to
fifty that an island is in a place or not,
And you're a map maker, should you err on the
side of putting it there or not putting it there?

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Like which would do which would do the least harm
if you were wrong?

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah? Yeah, I think it's that's a fair consideration. He
also points out that other matters were situations of fraud
or deception. May come back to that idea in the
next episode. He also mentions optical illusions as we've noted
already and you know, and we discussed in our Fata
Morgana episodes in the past. But he also stresses quote

(27:42):
that some volcanic islands do pop up and down, and
this is this is the this is what I want
to dive into for the remainder of this episode. He
mentioned specifically the alleged islands of Los Tuanahi or Tuanaki
near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. This is
one of several sites noted in the book Vanished Islands

(28:06):
and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick Nunn. His website,
by the way, is Patrick Nunn. That's You in dot org,
a really good website with links to all his books.
He's a scientist and author of multiple books dealing with
sunken lands, and seems to be one of the leading
living authorities on this subject. In Vanished Islands, None lists

(28:29):
twenty one Pacific islands that he classifies as quote satisfactorily
authenticated or partially authenticated islands and then in parentheses probably
real islands, while also identifying a longer list of islands
that are likely mythical. And I have to say, I
really wasn't expecting that there to be so many, you know,

(28:52):
there to be a list of twenty one Pacific islands
that are retained at least within oral traditions of the
people who have lived in this area, that have just vanished,
that have that that we're real at one point and
are now gone. But of course, as we'll discuss, it
is a geologically active area.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
Okay, so what would be some examples here?

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Well, he brings up the traditions of the people of
the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, and apparently there are
multiple oral traditions of often catastrophic land sinkings. So really,
ultimately exactly the sort of catastrophic island sinks into the
ocean sort of events that may pop into your head
and that you might think, well, this is more like

(29:36):
the kind of thing that occurs just in fictions and
fantasy and so forth. But None stresses that you know,
these have likely occurred throughout human history in these given areas,
throughout throughout the history of human occupation of these areas,
with fresh incidents, fresh sinkings, fresh events rejuvenating older traditions

(29:56):
and older ideas, as well as myths concerning a lot
lost islands that align with our previously discussed tropes of
utopias and Golden ages. None rights quote. Many such stories
have been believed in literally so that at various times,
oftentimes of famine, people have searched of these fabled islands
of plenty, but only one canoe has ever was ever

(30:18):
heard from again, So you know, you have these sorts
of stories where there was this place that we came from,
this place that was known and it was rich and
it was abundant, and during times of famine it might
be a place that people seek for again but cannot find.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
So what you would get is the story of the
failed attempt to rediscover the lost land.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah. Yeah, so it would seem. And so this is
again getting into that area where myth and reality kind
of feed into each other and it gets very very complex.
There are so many ways to look at any given
belief system. But to be clear, there are numerous examples,
according to the NUN of populated islands in this region

(31:02):
that sank beneath the waves. One example is tion Imanu,
previously located in a very seismically active part of the
Solomon Islands. In its current reduced state, it's known as
lark Shoal And apparently the sinking of Tanemanu was really rapid,

(31:23):
with only a few individuals escaping via canoe, but enough
escaped to pass on their accounts into the oral tradition.
And this is interesting because some of the details line
up with what we were just talking about with Doggerland,
but none says that the island was apparently affected by
a large seafloor earthquake that destabilized the underwater ridge that

(31:43):
the island was situated on, causing it to slide into
deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Oh okay, so this was not just continually increasing sea levels,
This was a rapid, sudden seismic event that the is
a sudden end to the land.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Yeah, I mean, this is a real cataclysm. This is
I kind of ironically the sort of thing that the
imagination may summon when you bring up the idea of
Atlantis sinking into the ocean. But I do have to
point out that he stresses that nothing you could describe
as a sunken continent exists in the Pacific Ocean. The
various lost islands he references are not at all on

(32:24):
the scale of pseudoscientific lands like Moo and Limuria.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
Right, So you really can't interpret any of the real
world examples as giving credence to any of these stories
of lost civilizations like Atlantis or Limoria or whatever, just
because like the details don't line up at all.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
Right, So none explores various islands at length in a
couple of the books that I looked at, but one
I found really interesting. It kind of lines up with
a lot of what we're talking about in these episodes,
and it's the land of Hawaiki. So in various Polynesian
mythologies and under some different specific names, this is the
homeland from which the people departed to populate the islands

(33:07):
of the Pacific. It takes on the character of not
only a place of origin, but especially with the Maori
spiritual underworld and or a land beneath the sea, a
place where the gods reside and the world where souls
return to and none points of that. Hawaki is generally
positioned in the west in these various traditions, which he

(33:30):
says certainly matches up with accepted migration patterns of humans,
you know, the last wave of true human exploration on
our planet. But he also says that as far as
mythology is concerned, it also could be more aligned with
ideas concerning death in the setting of the sun. So

(33:51):
just a reminder that there's so many factors to consider
in any given belief system and you ultimately, you know,
can't latch onto just like one explanation for why people
believe in something right, And he also stresses that we
should be culturally respectful and scientifically cautious about jumping to
any conclusions about Hawakei, which was you know, seems like

(34:13):
it was likely a real place or real places, not
the same island of origin for all peoples in this
region and all cultures. But we should be careful about
saying that it was an island that sank beneath the
waves in this case known rights that While some pseudoscience
writers have kind of picked this up and run with it,

(34:34):
linking it to concepts like Lemuria, like mu, the idea
that Hawaiki sank is not a widespread detail in actual
Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Oh that's interesting. So maybe people reporting the stories told
by other cultures but with their own gloss and the
sort of background of Atlantis knowledge and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah. Yeah, And I guess you could also approach like
you could also be reading about these other islands that
did sink, that are lost, and you know, you end
up looking at that evidence and then you take into
account this tradition as well. So Nun's work is really interesting.

(35:20):
He's been one of many voices stressing the threat that
climate change and rising sea levels pose to islands in
the West Pacific, where sea levels have risen at two
or three times the global average over the past few decades,
thus endangering not only the livelihoods and culture of modern inhabitants,
but endangering their histories as well. Pacific island reefs, which

(35:43):
only formed in the last four thousand years, according to Nune,
are particularly vulnerable to erosion via rising sea levels. He
stressed this in a twenty seventeen article for The Conversation.
Now it may come back to more of Nun's work
in the next episode. Again, there's so much of it.
If you're by this topic, I definitely recommend checking out
his work. But he also points to some other natural

(36:05):
phenomena that have led to past mistakes in erroneous island identification.
So these errors and saying I think there's an island here,
and then it turns out there's nothing there.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Okay, so the picture I'm getting correct me if this
is wrong. Is there are a lot of stories of
vanished islands. There are a few cases where it seems like, yes,
this really did happen, but the majority of cases seem
to be a mistake or a legend of some kind,
and there are a lot of different explanations correct explanations
for the mistakes. So yeah, what would those be.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Well, one of them that he brings up is, of
course floating vegetation. We've discussed this before. You know, things
like the sarcasm, a weed and so forth. You have
some sort of a big mat of vegetation out there,
And especially if you're unfamiliar with the area, if you've
never encountered this before and you're looking at it from
a distance, you might think, oh, well, there's some sort

(36:58):
of land out there. I'm not saying a mistake it
for like a huge, robust island, but you might mistake
it for something worth marking on a nautical map. The
other one, the other possibility that I was not prepared for,
that he mentions in passing, is that it could be
that what you're gazing out there is not a reef,
is not something you know, poking out of the water,

(37:21):
or even like a large expanse of of some some
sort of land mass. It could just be the white
scum of the pololo worm.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
I've never even heard of this. What what is this?

Speaker 2 (37:31):
So these are marine anlid worms of the Pacific Islands
that engage in mass spawning, and it's it's a weird one.
So these creatures live in the seafloor substrate, and they
they look like when we say worms, I mean they're
not like earth worms. They have various appendages, you know,
and they have these kind of like tentaclely things on

(37:53):
their their heads. Uh, they're you know, they're they're not.
I wouldn't say they're grotesque or anything. They're kind of
beautiful in their own way. To me.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
They kind of look like a cross between an earthworm
and a centipede.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Yeah, yeah, imagine something like that living in the seafloor substrate.
So then they live down there, they live in their
holes and so forth. But as breeding season approaches, they
begin to change. So first the tail of the worm
undergoes a great deal of alteration. Muscles and organs degenerate,
the appendages down there become more paddle like, and the

(38:29):
reproductive organs grow. They swell in size and end up
taking up more of the real estate and that back
half of the organism. And then, in line with the
phases of the moon, all of the pololo worms stick
their back halves out of their holes and then they rupture.
They break in two. The tail section full of reproductive

(38:52):
cells and again augmented now for swimming. It's broken off
and it swims up to the surface, while the rest
of the worm stays down in the seafloor muck and regenerates.
So the part that stays down there and regenerates is
the atok and then the epitopes are the bits that
go swimming up to the surface.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Okay, so they're going up to the surface taking sex
cells with them, yes, yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
So they go up to the surface and again all
at once. We're talking in the tens of thousands. This
is a mass spawning event. And then they just ride
around and release their gam meats. So it sounds like
a site to behold now. As with a lot of
mass spawning incidents in the ocean, this of course attracts

(39:39):
the attention of a lot of predators. If you're some
sort of a predatory fish in the vicinity and this
is occurring, well you've got more than an easy meal
on your hands. You've got to go there and get
a bite. And this applies to human beings as well.
Plolo worms and their relatives are considered quite a delicacy
in various cultures.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
I love this now.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
I was obviously, I was looking around for a little
more insight on this. I wanted to know, like, what
are they cooking with these? So what are they preparing?
And I did find an article on gastro obscura by
Sam O'Brien pointing out that, yeah, especially in Samoan traditions,
the pololos are often fried up with eggs. It's they're
baked into bread with coconut milk and onions, or they're

(40:23):
kind of like sprinkled or spread on toast. The author
here she describes it as a seaweed or caviar flavor,
but with a noodle texture. And I've seen it elsewhere
described as quote the caviaar of the Pacific.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
Ooh yeah, so savory, seafoody kind of taste. That sounds wonderful. Actually,
I want to try it.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Yeah. I included a photo here for you, Joe, and
I recommend everyone look up that article or just look
up pictures in general. And the picture I have here
for you, Joe is I believe it's a piece of
toast with this pilolo spread on top. And yeah, it
looks nice, reminiscent of like a cream spinach. I guess
just based on appearances, but again, the taste profile is

(41:04):
apparently more like caviare meets noodles.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
I don't know if it's just the lighting in this picture,
it almost looks kind of blue. It's like a like
a blue yeah, wilted wilted green kind of appearance spread
across a piece of toast.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Yeah, and yeah. I believe it's also a delicacy. A
related organism is a delicacy in Japan. So if we
have any listeners out there who've tried tried these dishes
or related dishes, please read, write in and share. We'd
love to hear your take on it.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
Well, I did not expect things to go in this direction.
I am mighty intrigued. I do want to try this food.
But wait a minute, I'm we got to convict. How
could this be mistaken for an island?

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Okay, so, after the breeding is finished, after the predators
have had their fill, after humans have come and harvested
their share of the of the spoils, the rest of
it again, the breeding is carried out, but apparently the
rest of it then just kind of rots and disintegrates
on the surface of the water into this white oily scum.

(42:08):
I found multiple especially older like Western descriptions, clearly describing
it as a scum, an oily scum, And apparently this
is what we could then potentially mistake for an island,
I'm guessing, especially by individuals who are not familiar with
the organisms, because you know, obviously there would be locals

(42:33):
who would know about this because they know what is
left behind after they've gone out and harvested their share
of the pololo worms. But if you didn't know what
you're looking at, you might see like a big sort
of gleaming, oily white mass and you might think that
it is some sort of a land mass.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Well, so this reminds me of something we've actually talked
about on the show before, which is pummice rafting phenomenon.
Sometimes after a volcanic eruption in one of these islands,
there will be a great outflow of pummus low density
rocks that actually rocks that float on the surface of
the water and all kind of clump together. And if
you look up pictures of this, it looks extremely weird.

(43:12):
It's like a parking lot floating in the middle of
the ocean. So all of these floating phenomena, Yeah, you
can have a floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that
you know you should mark as an island on a map.
You I guess could imagine a pummus raft, though that's
a fairly transient phenomenon that related to these volcanic eruptions.

(43:33):
And now we've got to add a worm sex to
the list. Worm sex island.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
Worm sex island. Yeah, something that again would be it
would it would It would occur every year, but it
wouldn't always be out there, and it seems entirely likely
that the foreigners to the to these seas mind encounter
it and make note of it, and you could end
up with an erroneous island identification. So yeah, I was
not expecting to talk about worm reproduction in this episode,

(44:03):
but that's where the research took us.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
Amazing. But hey, we are not done, are we. We've
got to talk about more sunken lands, So we will
be back next time to explore this topic further.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
That's right. In the meantime, will remind you that Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do list mails
on Mondays. On Wednesdays, we tend to do a short
form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to watch a weird movie
on Weird House Cinema. If you are on social media,

(44:37):
follow our accounts because they are they're active once more.
If you use Instagram, look us up specifically. Stbym podcast
is our handle. There's an old one that has sunken
beneath the waves of social media, but stbym podcast is
the active one, and I think there's some pretty fun
stuff going up there, so so it's one way to

(44:57):
keep up.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
With this huge things. As always to our excellent audio
producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your

(45:21):
Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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