November 28, 2024 • 40 mins
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 3 of 4, originally published 12/05/2023)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today we're bringing you an older
episode of the show, an episode from the vault. This
is part three of the series that we started running
last Saturday. This is called The Sunken Lands. This episode,
in particular, aired originally on December fifth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
My name is Robert Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick.
And we're back with part three in our series called
the Sunken Lands, about places on Earth that were relatively
recently solid land but are now covered by the waters.
In the previous two parts of this series, we discussed myths, legends,
and obsolete theories of sunken lands, including the most popular
(01:06):
drowned civilization Atlantis, an advanced island state discussed in the
writings of Plato, which the majority of experts on the
original sources seem to think is best interpreted as a
fictional setting used to illustrate a point in Plato's writings,
rather than a reference to a real place that actually existed,
but of course, that does not stop the many Atlantis
(01:27):
hunters of the Internet.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Right, and it doesn't stop the human imagination which has
gone wild with the concept, as we discussed in many
responsible ways and occasionally irresponsible ways as well. Right.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So, we also talked about the very real sunken land
mass now known as dogger Land, which was a vast
plane connecting Great Britain to mainland Europe during and for
several thousand years following the Last Ice Age. Doggerland is
a fascinating mystery that archaeologists and other scientists are learning
(02:01):
more about all the time. But one of the most
intriguing things that we've learned is that this drowned world
was not only inhabited by humans for the few thousand
years after it began warming at the beginning of the Holocene.
It was something many experts have described it as something
of a paradise, rich with resources, and possibly one of
(02:23):
the most densely populated places in Middle Stone Age Europe.
But of course it was eventually smothered underneath rising seas
and also battered by a colossal tsunami from an underwater
landslide around sixty two hundred BCE. After that, we talked
about cases of alleged vanishing islands in the Pacific, including
(02:44):
reasons for thinking that some of these accounts are genuine.
One example that you brought up, rob is the island
of Taeo Nimanu, a former island described in the oral
traditions of some of the Solomon Islanders, which allegedly sang
the waves in a rapid seismic event. So this happened suddenly,
and some people barely escaped in canoes, And according to
(03:08):
the sources we were looking at last time, it is
thought that this probably did actually happen.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, Yeah, that seems to be the consensus.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Though there are of course many other examples of alleged
vanishing islands, being more likely just cases of mistaken identification
in the first instance, probably. We discussed reasons for possibly
mistaking something for an island, maybe visual illusions like fatimorgana,
or being mistaken about where you are when you see
an actual island, or mistaking patches of things floating in
(03:40):
the water for land. One example we talked about was seaweed,
another was volcanic pumice rafts, and then everybody's favorite, the
possibility that somebody could mistake white oily scum left over
after seasonal worm sex as some indication of a land mass.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
It's absolutely in the mix.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I wanted to talk about another example of a quite
real sunken land that we have tons of evidence for.
Many people were probably thinking about it when we were
talking about dogger Land, because this is, perhaps, at least
to North Americans, the even more famous sunken land bridge
between two continental masses, and that would be the submerged
(04:20):
plains of Beringia. This refers to an area of the
globe between northwestern North America, including Alaska and Northwest Canada
on one side, and northeastern Russia on the other. And
it is now thought that during the Late Pleistocene, so
the Last Ice Age, huge expanses of what are now
(04:43):
the Bearing Sea, the Bearing Strait, and the Chuckchi Sea
were lands exposed by dropping sea levels. So the geological
story of Beringia has some things in common with the
story of dogger Land, which we talked about previously. The
lower sea levels of the Pleistocene were associated with massive
(05:04):
glacier formation. During the last Glacial maximum roughly twenty thousand
years ago, about twenty five percent of the Earth's land
surface and about eight percent of its total surface was
covered in ice, and global sea level was like four
hundred feet lower than it is today. It's hard to
imagine the amount of ice unless maybe you have been
(05:26):
to Antarctica or something. And at that time much of
North America, basically almost all of the current area of Canada,
especially east of the Rocky Mountains, but reaching as far
south as Ohio and Indiana in the United States, all
of that was covered in an ice formation known as
the Laurentide ice Sheet, which at its greatest extent was
(05:50):
more than thirteen million square kilometers and at its thickest,
probably near the middle, may have been up to three
thousand meters tall, which is almost two miles high of ice.
It's kind of hard to imagine. Again, and during this
time of lower sea levels, it has long been thought
that the much of the exposed land of Beringia probably
(06:14):
was some kind of step tundra environment, a sort of cold,
arid grassland. But at the end of the Pleistocene, roughly
ten to twelve thousand years ago, the earth began to warm,
ice melted, and sea levels rose, and these were the trends,
of course, that eventually covered doggerland and water, and the
same happened to the exposed lands of Beringia. Now there
(06:38):
is no land bridge connecting North America to Asia, but
at the time there was, it served as an important
corridor of exchange between the continents, with evidence showing that plants, animals,
and people spread through and across it. Now a lot
of people probably know that the Beringia land Bridge plays
a role in several of the current competing major theories
(07:00):
of how people came to occupy the Americas, though there
are of course competing explanations even within that space. For example,
the question of whether the first people to come to
North America traveled by land and found a way south
through an ice free inland corridor, and if they did
that at what time, or whether those people migrated along
(07:21):
the coastline of Beringia mostly traveling by boat, surviving along
the way with the help of kelp forests and other
coastal resources. So there are still lots of open questions
in that debate.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
But we know this was the corridor for the exchange
of many different species, and we've discussed some examples of
this on the show before, ranging from you know, of
course human beings to also things like species of camel.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
And other things that I didn't even think about until
I was reading for this episode, like the gray wolf,
the exchange of the wolf.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Now, an interesting thing I was thinking about was a
similarity with dogger Land. As we mentioned with dogger Land,
the phrase land bridge can potentially be deceptive. On one hand,
it does sort of accurately describe what happens when sea
levels drop and a ground corridor is established between two
(08:14):
land masses that used to be and or would later
be separated by water. On the other hand, the term
bridge kind of creates the impression of a transitional space
that one merely crosses to get from one side to
the other. Like you don't build a house in the
middle of a bridge. Well, I guess you might if
it's one of those bridges without buildings on it in
(08:36):
Italy or France or wherever. But but you know what
I mean, most of the time, you don't set up
camp in the middle of a bridge.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think this is this is
this is a concept that always kind of comes to
mind whenever I'm reading about land bridges. On some level,
you're imagining it as a situation where like the wolves
and the camels are like, hey, guys, there's a temporary
passage between these two land masses. Let's all go get
at it. And you know, everybody rushes to get from
one side to the other, and then the land bridge
(09:03):
goes away.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Right, So that can be kind of deceptive. In the
case of Doggerland, we know that not only was the
now flooded land inhabited by Neanderthals and later Mesolithic Homo
sapiens during its brief warm period, for the few thousand
years between the end of the Pleistocene and the time
it was under the water, it was probably one of
(09:24):
the most resource abundant places in Europe, and as I
said earlier, it may have been one of the most
densely populated as well. So with that in mind, to
what extent could we also think of Beringia more as
a destination in itself, a place to be, rather than
just a way to get somewhere. Well, in fact, we
(09:45):
know that it was a habitat environment for many terrestrial
plants and animals, and so the real question is to
what extent this would be true for people as well.
So I came across one paper from twenty fourteen, raising
a few lines of evidence for thinking that the large,
now submerged plane in the middle of the Bearing Land
(10:06):
Bridge was actually a relatively habitable refuge for plants, animals,
and people during the last glacial maximum and may have
been home to an isolated population of Native American ancestors
for thousands of years. So the paper is called out
of Beringia question Mark, published in the journal Science in
(10:27):
twenty fourteen by Hoffiker, Elias and O'Rourke, and one of
the core pieces of evidence here is a sampling of
mitochondrial DNA from more than six hundred Native American people
in the present, most of whom shared unique mitochondrial DNA
mutations not shared by their closest relatives in Asia, indicating
(10:49):
that most likely they can trace their ancestry back to
a group of people that was living isolated from people
in the rest of Asia for thousands of years, perhaps
ten thousand years or so, before spreading across the continents
of North and South America. And if this is in
fact the case, where would this population of people be living,
(11:11):
perhaps in a region of Beringia that supported long term settlement. Now,
you might think, but wait a minute, it wasn't Beringia
too cold and arid and free of resources not necessarily.
Palaeoecological evidence is showing that parts of central Beringia may
have actually been more rich in plant and animal resources
(11:32):
that would potentially support continued human habitation. And this evidence
includes things cited by these authors like sediment cores that
you would take from the bottom of the Bering Sea,
so you like core out an area of the sediment
strata there and see what's in it. And it turns
out these sediment samples contain remnants of pollen and other
(11:53):
plant matter and insects that indicate that while outer regions
of Beringia may have been more inhospitable and arid, very
like dry cold step lands, the central lowlands of Beringia
may very well have had plenty of animal populations for
hunting and especially important woody plants which could have been
(12:15):
used as fuel for fires. And as we know, wood
is a big deal. There there was not a whole
lot of wood available in the Arctic at the time
due to the extent the extent of the glaciers, and
fuel for fire can make the difference between a place
being able to sustain human life or not so.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Already we're painting an entirely different picture of a quote
unquote land Bridge than I think a lot of us
might have had in our head right.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
So to quote lead author John Hoffecker, who is a
professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Speaking to Live Science,
he said, quote, the central part of Beringia was probably
the mildest, most comfortable place to live at high latitudes
during the last glacial maximum. It is the most logical
place for a group of people to hunker down, and
(13:03):
the term used for this area is a glacial refugium,
a place where organisms can survive despite hostile conditions in
the surrounding areas. So this might have been a sort
of warmer, milder, wetter area in the middle of very cold, dry,
or glaciated areas that would be able to maintain all
(13:26):
of this diversity of species like shrub trees that you
could burn for wood, and animals that could sustain human hunting,
and possibly people living there for thousands of years. So
the idea of many millennia of people living isolated in
this refugium is sometimes referred to as the Barringian standstill
(13:47):
hypothesis and though it's not meant to. I feel like
this is another one where the word choice brings some
of the wrong connotations, because stand still kind of like
bridge it to me, at least, it implies a connotation
that like, these people would have been trying to get
somewhere and then they were stalled or delayed, rather than
(14:09):
this is simply where and how people were living their lives,
just like anywhere else on earth.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Yeah again, because you're talking about thousands of years here,
You're not talking about again, this brief opportunity to move
from point A to point B. It is instead the
emergence of a point C.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
At least, I feel like the historical perspective we have
often leads to misconceptions like this, Like when you look
back through history, we know or simply have an idea
right or wrong of what happened before and after a
period of time. And with that historical perspective, I think
(14:44):
we often have a hard time understanding that people within
that period probably did not think of themselves as transitional
between two things, but were trying to live their lives
like anyone else. And you know, I was having the
same pattern of thoughts about dogger Land, like we now
know that it was really only this lush buffet of
(15:07):
a world for a few thousand years in Doggerland. But
to the people living there it was it was probably
just home, right.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, I mean to your point, like this was to them,
To them, this was the world. You know, they not
to discount the possibility that they had some oral traditions
or so forth of the places they came from or
the world before. But you know it E'SCW. You know,
hindsight is twenty twenty and that certainly applies to our
(15:35):
understanding of history.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I guess the other way of looking at it is
that on a on a long enough time scale, all
people living in all places at all times are living
in transitional points.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yes, that's interesting to think about because it kind of
comes back to what we discussed in previous episodes about
golden ages, lost golden ages, the thing that that we're
trying to reclaim or try trying to find again. You know,
that also kind of loses side of the fact that
life is is continually a state of change and and
(16:09):
there it's always in a state of transition, and you know,
it reminds me, I forget what talk this was, but
there was a talk that Terrence McKenna gave where he
used the line and if something needs to be done,
you will find yourself doing it, which I think I
forget the exact context of it, but you know, it
kind of speaks to to how human beings have survived
(16:32):
and and and and grown and expanded so much over
the course of their existence. They have expanded into new areas,
they have left areas, they have changed, they have they
have rolled with the punches of transition. And but at
the same time, you know, created these these stories and
looked back longingly at supposed better times, whether or not
(16:53):
they were actually better.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's a good point. But to come back to the
Barringian standstill hypothesis, it is important to remember that this
is just a hypothesis. Like it would need more direct
evidence in its favor, such as especially archaeological discoveries, which
had not been found at the time this article was published.
And I looked around and couldn't find any evidence of
(17:16):
archaeological discoveries backing it up since then, and critics of
this hypothesis argue that not only do we not have
archaeological evidence, we probably should expect to have found some
by now, since not all of this territory is underwater,
though a lot of it is. But either way, so
we don't know. This is an idea, it may or
(17:36):
may not be correct. But if this idea is correct,
once the surrounding glaciers began to melt, the ideas that
the Burringian people probably expanded their territory and then moved
on down the coastline and into the interior of the
North American continent and spread on from there. But the
ultimate point about the land being that much like Doggerland,
(17:58):
this is an area that was land when when the
glaciers were at their peak, when when the water was
locked in the ice, and so there were these vast
stretches of plains that are now buried beneath the sea.
And there's probably a lot more that we could know
about them more easily if it were not underneath the sea,
and we could, you know, just go around and do
digs and look for palaeontological remains, you know, animal remains,
(18:23):
plant remains, and and see if we could find human
tools and remains of what people were doing in these places.
But it's again more challenging because of the water covering things.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Now, yeah, well, that's fascinating. Again, that kind of essentially
kind of turns over this loose idea that I had
in my head of land bridges. So this might be
an interesting general topic to come back to in the future. Now,
(18:58):
in all this talk of some lands and lost islands
in particular that we got into in the last episode,
I thought it might be fun to explore something that
lines up with this concept in a unique way, and
that is the topic of atolls or atalls. You apparently
can say it both ways, and hey, I might just
(19:19):
say it both ways this week proceed here. Uh So,
these are essentially coral reefs in circling a lagoon. They're
not always circular, but there are some stunning examples of
circular atolls, and you can you've you've probably seen pictures
of these. There are numerous examples of them. Big Blue
Hole Belize is one that is commonly mentioned and commonly photographed.
(19:44):
But it's like, yeah, you have this this circular reef
reef islands and then in the middle more water. So
it looks like, you know, this looks like something is missing, right,
And this is certainly invited curiosity over over the many
years here as long as people have been in calendar
them because it raises the question how did they form?
This was actually a question that none other than Charles
(20:06):
Darwin considered on the Voyage of the Ahms Beagle during
the eighteen thirties. So when I was reading about that,
I had to pull open his book, The Voyage of
the Beagle. And yeah, he gets into this at one point,
and he writes about some of the theories of the day
that he was less convinced by. So the first idea
(20:27):
he brings up is that quote, coral building, animals instinctively
built up their great circles to afford themselves protection in
the inner parts. So that would seem to imply that, yeah,
you have coral is like growing up from the seabed
and building a great ring so that they can have
like a protected area in the middle. And on this
(20:48):
theory he points out that, okay, coral don't thrive within
the atl lagoon. And this would be a case in
which quote many species of distinct genera and families are
supposed to come buind for one end, and of such
a combination, not a single instance can be found in
the whole of nature.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
M Okay, So the creatures forming the reef would have
to be all working together to protect this inner area.
But also, he points out, like you don't really see
the coral doing much in the inner area. It's not
like they're, oh, that's the place where they keep all
their soft parts. They're just not really in there.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Yeah. And then additionally, where else in the natural world
do we see this kind of like cross genera cooperation
going on. I mean, I guess you could. You know,
there's some little instances here and there where you talk
about you know, prey animal communication and alerting, you know,
generally to the idea of predators in their myths, but
something a lot on the scale of this, he argues,
(21:46):
we don't.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Really see it, Okay.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
The next theory he mentions is that atolls are based
on submarine craters, and he points out that this doesn't
hold up when you look at all the examples in
the world that were known at the time. It just
simply doesn't account for everything. Another idea that he explores
is the idea that coral edges were exposed to the
outer sea and along these edges grew up more quickly.
(22:11):
But as with theory one, the question remains, what did
they grow on he stresses that rebuilding corals cannot live
at great depth, and therefore, like what would grow up
then to be, it doesn't make sense that they would
start deep down and then grow up, because we know
that these corals that live near the surface don't thrive
in the deep water, right, So.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
It's only in the the shallow. Living corals only live
in these areas that are already shallow for some reason.
Like it's like it's almost an island.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Right right. And it's worth noting that there are deep
water corals and they do produce deep sea reefs, but
it's structurally different, apparently. So he writes at fair length
about all of this and about what he thinks is happening,
And here's a section that more or less encapsulates it. Quote,
as the barrier re slowly sinks down, the corals will
(23:02):
go on vigorously growing upwards. But as the island sinks
this would be the island around which the reef is formed.
He continues, the water will gain inch by inch on
the shore, the separate mountains first forming separate islands within
one great reef, and finally the last and highest pinnacle
disappearing the instant this takes place, a perfect atoll is formed.
(23:26):
I have said, removed the high land from within the
an encircling barrier reef, and an atoll is left, and
the land has been removed. We can now perceive how
it comes that atolls, having sprung from encircling barrier reefs,
resemble them in general size form, in the manner in
which they are coupled together, and in their arrangement in
single or double lines. For they may be called rude
(23:47):
outlined charts of the sunken islands over which they stand.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
M okay. So the idea there would be a volcanic
island that forms, it gradually begins to sink, but as
it is sinking, the barrier reef is built up to
encircle it in the shallow water around it, and that
height comes up as the central island just continues to
go down. So an atoll, to come back to the
(24:13):
idea of sort of transitional landforms, is somewhere in between
a volcanic island and eventually fully sunken island.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Right. And in this case, yeah, the volcanic island is
no longer active and it's falling away. Meanwhile, the coral
is alive and it's building up.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Hm, that makes sense?
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Was he right? Well, it's interesting so that this is
generally referred to as the subsistence model, and it does it.
It seems like it's very much in the mix today.
You certainly see it sided all over the place, and
it pops up in textbooks and so forth. But not
everyone loves it, and there are some very vocal experts
(24:57):
who who say this is really this really does a
explain everything, and we ultimately need to look maybe more
at another theory, or ultimately look at sort of a
host of theories, and that maybe we should get away
from the idea that one theory in general is going
to explain every formation like this that we find in
the world's oceans. There's another key formation theory called the
(25:19):
antecedent Karst model, and this one proposes that dropping sea
levels that this has to do with like cyclical changes
in sea level over time. It proposes that dropping sea
levels expose the top of a flat topped bank of
carbonate rocks, and then while this is exposed again for
(25:41):
life with our land bridge model, not for just a
couple of days, but for an extended period of time,
rain water steadily pools in the flat topped bank and
dissolves some of the carbonate, forming a depression. Eventually, sea
levels rise again and fresh coral builds up a top
this raised circuit edge. Again, roughly speaking, it doesn't have
(26:02):
to be anything remotely resembling a perfect circle. But then
the coral builds up on this raised circular edge of
the depression. This forms the atoll according to this theory.
So again, it has a lot to do with cyclical
changes in sea level.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Oh okay, so much. Kind of like how a cave
is formed in limestone by like rainwater coming down or
water rushing through and dissolving some of the sedimentary rock
and eventually forming a cave. Here, the idea would be
that in the times when a seamount or island top
(26:38):
is exposed by lowering sea levels, the rainwater comes down
and sort of it dissolves it in kind of the
same way that rainwater dissolves a cave cavity, and it
lowers the central area of the island, But of course
the coral is still building up the reef all around
that central raised area.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Yeah, that's my understanding of this. Alexander Witz wrote a
great article about the antecedent Carse model back in twenty
twenty one for Noble magazine and was then reprinted on Smithsonian,
where you can also find it. So I was reading
about that here, and the author makes several key points
that I wanted to draw out for this discussion. First
(27:17):
of all, the author rights that experts that generally agree
that Darwin got it wrong with his theory, they also
admit that he crafted a very insightful theory for the
day given the limited amount of data. Also, some reefs
may have still formed via the method that Darwin is
describing here, such as some atolls found in Tahiti. And
(27:42):
in any case, they often stressed it we shouldn't look
maybe for one unifying theory for atoll formation, because there
may ultimately be a handful of explanations in the mix,
including things like tectonic forces and wave action. Ah.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
That's a good point. Yeah, there could be multiple mechanisms
create similar looking formations.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah. The author also points out that understanding the varying
reasons in play also helps us to understand which atolls
are most at risk from climate change and rising sea levels.
The author writes, quote, in the absence of humans, atolls
can grow at a rate much faster than that of
sea level rise. But people have degraded natural atolls by
(28:22):
introducing pollution and waste, altering the water table, and adding
concrete and asphalt that smothers the underlying coral. The Maldives
in the Indian Ocean face a future of flooding, water contamination,
and erosion that threaten its tourism and fishery industries. The Malieves,
by the way, according to the article, may have formed
more due to the action of waves wave based erosion
(28:44):
than by the clarsification theory that I was talking about earlier,
at least according to one study. But to come back
to just the topic of sunken lands and sunken islands
in general, yea, I think atolls fit into the concept those.
So the added discussion and or disagreement concerns exactly how
central exposed land masses may have formed and or fallen away,
(29:07):
and you know to what extent it involves things essentially,
you know, rising from the ocean or then sinking back
below the depths. Because both Darwin and the carcidification theories
entail a central exposed land mass or island around which
the coreal builds.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
I mean part of me would wonder if you could
just do some extent tell the difference between these by
looking at the kind of rock, because in Darwin's theory,
for example, if the idea is that the island is
volcanic in origin, wouldn't you be mainly looking at volcanic
rock leftover in the middle, whereas if it's a karc
process you would be looking at sedimentary rock in the middle.
(29:48):
Am I wrong about that?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
The article I said it does go into more detail
about this, And yeah, it's my understanding that a lot
of what we know now it does hinge upon geologic
evidence that we just that Darwin wasn't exposed to then
did not have back in the day, And so we
do know a lot more about what sorts of rocks
are underlying any given land mass that we're discussing.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
So I guess if the larcification explanation has come more
into favor, that would suggest that more often the coral
Atoll is found around a like a limestone formation rather
than a volcanic rock formation.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
That would seem to be the case. But again, based
on what I was reading, it sounds like it is
maybe a suite of the theories that we might turn
to as opposed to again one unifying theory for all
of these atolls. Now, as we touched on during the
(30:51):
first episode, I wanted to come back around to this
because water levels don't only rise due to geologic events
and storms and global warming. It also occurs when humans
build dams to form artificial lakes. Well, I mean, I
guess you could maybe make an argument for beavers as well,
but especially humans. That's true, humans can pour concrete, but
(31:15):
you know this allows humans to otherwise manipulate rivers and lakes,
and it's worth stressing that in addition to hydro electricity.
And you'll know this if you've ever visited a dam
and gone through like a you know the educational portion
of the dam in addition to producing electricity. Another major
reason for dams is to often detame rivers that periodically
(31:35):
endanger neighboring and low lying areas. But in doing so
in creating lakes, we of course sometimes sink formerly inhabited lands,
both ancient and modern. And of course this has taken
place all over the world. There are so many examples
that we could turn to, but I thought I might
highlight some examples that stood out to me and of course,
(31:56):
many others come up. We may bring them up later,
and certainly feel free to write in about examples that
come to your mind. But one that is often mentioned is,
of course the site of Abu Simbel in Egypt. This
was an ancient rock cut temple complex near the current
Egyptian Sudanese border, and it dates back to the thirteenth
(32:16):
century BCE. This site was threatened by Lake Nasser. This
is the Aswan Dam reservoir during the twentieth century, but
in nineteen sixty eight it was actually relocated to another site,
so a massive relocation effort to move everything to a
higher elevation further away from the water. Another famous dam,
(32:39):
of course is the Three Gorgeous Dam in China. That
also entailed a great deal of relocation from the area
to be flooded in terms of like the lake that's
going to build up, but also the river itself. And
this also included something called White Crane Ridge. It's an
archaeological site. The inscriptions here date back to the Tung
(33:00):
dynasty and provide detailed water level records on the Yangzi River,
some I think one two hundred years worth of data.
They've done. What I was reading some of the carvings
were relocated, but others remain in a special underwater museum
constructed prior to the flooding. So you apparently this is
underneath the river, so you apparently take an escalator down
(33:23):
from a facility by the riverbank through some tunnels to
reach the museum. WHOA Another example from China that I
ran across is Lion City or Hieching in eastern China.
It's an example of an Eastern Han dynasty city that
is now under the waters of a man made lake.
This is Thousand Island Lake. This was flooded in the
(33:45):
mid twentieth century as well, when most of these projects
are taking place around the world, and it has apparently
become a tourism destination, at least for very experienced divers.
I read that it's not really the kind of thing
that casual divers are going down for, but experienced divers
have sought this out, and you can find some images
online of various sort of you know, haunting underwater remnants
(34:07):
of this place.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
As a creature of East Tennessee, I grew up with
a lot of consciousness of the idea of lands flooded
by the creation of dams, specifically with the TVA hydro Electric.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Yeah, the Tennessee Valley Authority, right, Yeah, things like Kentucky Lake,
there are always a lot of you know, these are
anytime you have a big lake like this, there's gonna
be some sort of relocation effort that has to take place.
And I feel like inevitably you're gonna have some things
left behind beneath the water, and on top of what's
actually underneath the water, you're gonna have stories about what
(34:40):
maybe underneath the water, you know, tales of lost towns
and so forth.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
I think I used to have dreams when I was
little of finding houses submerged underneath the lake.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah. Yeah, And this sort of thing has been explored
in media. He pops up in the Coen Brothers or
brother Where art thou So? Yeah, And I think ultimately,
wherever you're listening to this show, you probably don't have
to go too far to find an example of some
sort of an artificial lake, and there may be stories
about like the impact of creating that lake.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Of course you kind of alluded to this earlier, but
one of the interesting things about the flooding of these
river valleys by the creation of dams. Is that often
one of the purposes of it is to prevent uncontrolled flooding.
I know this is it's fundamentally changed what the Nile
River valley is that they put all these dams in
because there used to be, you know, this uncontrolled seasonal
(35:35):
flooding of the Nile that was just part of life
in Egypt. And now that in some ways the water
level of the Nile has been to some degree broad
under human control.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, and so you see this sort of thing all over.
I have to say, though I know I wasn't familiar
with this example till I started doing research here. There's
perhaps fewer examples, few examples that are as stunning as this.
But there's a town in northern Italy, or a village
in northern Italy by the name of Kuran, and it's
apparently pretty famous for there a lot of images of this,
(36:07):
but I wasn't familiar with it. But this is another
case where they had to relocate the town to a
higher elevation as the original site was flooded in nineteen fifty.
So most of the city was abandoned and demoed first,
except for a lone fourteenth century church and its Bell Tower.
The Bell Tower still sticks out of the water in
(36:28):
rather surrealistic fashion. You'll find images of it where it's
just like, oh, here's the mountains, there's a lake, and
here is a bell tower sticking out of it. I mean,
some of these images don't even look real. It looks
like some sort of obvious photoshop, But these are legitimate.
There are other images of the lake frozen over and
here is the Bell Tower emerging from the ice. Sometimes
(36:50):
you see images where people have ventured out onto the
ice close to it.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
In some of the pictures. I just looked up pictures
of it, and in a lot of them, there seems
to be a gradient on the tower as it sticks up,
like the stone is a little paler for most of
the way up, and then there will be a lower
area where the stone is darker. And I don't know
if this is the reason, but I wonder if that's
you know, it's literally just from the water level going
up and down, and so you can see where the
(37:15):
water has been on the on the height of the stone.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
Yeah, I believe that is the case. I've read that
during the spring, when the water is at its lowest,
you can apparently see more of the ruins. But yeah,
I encourage everyone to look up image of this because
it's pretty impressive and you can't have something in like
this in the world, of course without it inspiring some
level of superstition and in fiction. And sure enough, there
(37:41):
is an Italian supernatural TV drama about this town, or
at least I don't know if it's about the set
in the town and invokes the idea of the town.
It is called Kuron. It's apparently I think it's on Netflix.
I don't know if that's like, if that's in the States,
or if that's just in Italy or other international markets.
But c r o in if anyone out there has
seen it, do write in and let us know. I'm
(38:03):
wondering how they I mean, there's so many directions you
can go in. You're talking about an abandoned underwater church
like that.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
That's perfect well, not to spoil the fund, but to
be clear, I think they removed the church. It's just
the tower that's there, right, or at least in the
pictures I've seen.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
I'm uncertain about that. There may be some ruins down there,
But then again, if you're if you're making a supernatural drama,
TV show. Why not have the church down there? You
can have whatever you like down there. Merphult going to church, ghosts, raiths,
I don't know, there's so many directions.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Oh, it's like the pious undead that we talked about.
Was it last year or the year before? All the
revenants are going to church?
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Yeah, yeah, and there. This is like a rich folkloric
region of Europe too that we're talking about. So there's
so many ideas you could pull in, you know, ideas
that predate the creation of man made lakes for sure.
I also want to point now worth looking up or
images of the Quran coat of arms, because I'm not
sure on the exact history of this, like when they
(39:06):
changed it or adapted it. But the coat of arms
depicts a tower, the Bell Tower, emerging from the water,
so pretty cool. If you have visited this location, right
in and let us know, because I'd love to hear
your first person account of this haunting bell tower. All right,
we're going to go ahead and leave it there, but yeah,
go ahead and write in if you have any thoughts
on anything we've discussed so far in this series. Just
(39:30):
to remind you that stuff to blow your mind is
primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
listener mail on Mondays, usually an artifact or monster fact
episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. If you use social media, you can
follow us at any of your favorite social media sites,
I think, unless we're not on that site, but we're
(39:51):
on a few of them, so you know, to have
a look around, maybe you can find us. If you're
on Instagram, you can find us at stbym Podcast.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Follow us on MySpace. Huge thanks 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.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows.
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today we're bringing you an older
episode of the show, an episode from the vault. This
is part three of the series that we started running
last Saturday. This is called The Sunken Lands. This episode,
in particular, aired originally on December fifth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
My name is Robert Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick.
And we're back with part three in our series called
the Sunken Lands, about places on Earth that were relatively
recently solid land but are now covered by the waters.
In the previous two parts of this series, we discussed myths, legends,
and obsolete theories of sunken lands, including the most popular
(01:06):
drowned civilization Atlantis, an advanced island state discussed in the
writings of Plato, which the majority of experts on the
original sources seem to think is best interpreted as a
fictional setting used to illustrate a point in Plato's writings,
rather than a reference to a real place that actually existed,
but of course, that does not stop the many Atlantis
(01:27):
hunters of the Internet.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Right, and it doesn't stop the human imagination which has
gone wild with the concept, as we discussed in many
responsible ways and occasionally irresponsible ways as well. Right.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So, we also talked about the very real sunken land
mass now known as dogger Land, which was a vast
plane connecting Great Britain to mainland Europe during and for
several thousand years following the Last Ice Age. Doggerland is
a fascinating mystery that archaeologists and other scientists are learning
(02:01):
more about all the time. But one of the most
intriguing things that we've learned is that this drowned world
was not only inhabited by humans for the few thousand
years after it began warming at the beginning of the Holocene.
It was something many experts have described it as something
of a paradise, rich with resources, and possibly one of
(02:23):
the most densely populated places in Middle Stone Age Europe.
But of course it was eventually smothered underneath rising seas
and also battered by a colossal tsunami from an underwater
landslide around sixty two hundred BCE. After that, we talked
about cases of alleged vanishing islands in the Pacific, including
(02:44):
reasons for thinking that some of these accounts are genuine.
One example that you brought up, rob is the island
of Taeo Nimanu, a former island described in the oral
traditions of some of the Solomon Islanders, which allegedly sang
the waves in a rapid seismic event. So this happened suddenly,
and some people barely escaped in canoes, And according to
(03:08):
the sources we were looking at last time, it is
thought that this probably did actually happen.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, Yeah, that seems to be the consensus.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Though there are of course many other examples of alleged
vanishing islands, being more likely just cases of mistaken identification
in the first instance, probably. We discussed reasons for possibly
mistaking something for an island, maybe visual illusions like fatimorgana,
or being mistaken about where you are when you see
an actual island, or mistaking patches of things floating in
(03:40):
the water for land. One example we talked about was seaweed,
another was volcanic pumice rafts, and then everybody's favorite, the
possibility that somebody could mistake white oily scum left over
after seasonal worm sex as some indication of a land mass.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
It's absolutely in the mix.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I wanted to talk about another example of a quite
real sunken land that we have tons of evidence for.
Many people were probably thinking about it when we were
talking about dogger Land, because this is, perhaps, at least
to North Americans, the even more famous sunken land bridge
between two continental masses, and that would be the submerged
(04:20):
plains of Beringia. This refers to an area of the
globe between northwestern North America, including Alaska and Northwest Canada
on one side, and northeastern Russia on the other. And
it is now thought that during the Late Pleistocene, so
the Last Ice Age, huge expanses of what are now
(04:43):
the Bearing Sea, the Bearing Strait, and the Chuckchi Sea
were lands exposed by dropping sea levels. So the geological
story of Beringia has some things in common with the
story of dogger Land, which we talked about previously. The
lower sea levels of the Pleistocene were associated with massive
(05:04):
glacier formation. During the last Glacial maximum roughly twenty thousand
years ago, about twenty five percent of the Earth's land
surface and about eight percent of its total surface was
covered in ice, and global sea level was like four
hundred feet lower than it is today. It's hard to
imagine the amount of ice unless maybe you have been
(05:26):
to Antarctica or something. And at that time much of
North America, basically almost all of the current area of Canada,
especially east of the Rocky Mountains, but reaching as far
south as Ohio and Indiana in the United States, all
of that was covered in an ice formation known as
the Laurentide ice Sheet, which at its greatest extent was
(05:50):
more than thirteen million square kilometers and at its thickest,
probably near the middle, may have been up to three
thousand meters tall, which is almost two miles high of ice.
It's kind of hard to imagine. Again, and during this
time of lower sea levels, it has long been thought
that the much of the exposed land of Beringia probably
(06:14):
was some kind of step tundra environment, a sort of cold,
arid grassland. But at the end of the Pleistocene, roughly
ten to twelve thousand years ago, the earth began to warm,
ice melted, and sea levels rose, and these were the trends,
of course, that eventually covered doggerland and water, and the
same happened to the exposed lands of Beringia. Now there
(06:38):
is no land bridge connecting North America to Asia, but
at the time there was, it served as an important
corridor of exchange between the continents, with evidence showing that plants, animals,
and people spread through and across it. Now a lot
of people probably know that the Beringia land Bridge plays
a role in several of the current competing major theories
(07:00):
of how people came to occupy the Americas, though there
are of course competing explanations even within that space. For example,
the question of whether the first people to come to
North America traveled by land and found a way south
through an ice free inland corridor, and if they did
that at what time, or whether those people migrated along
(07:21):
the coastline of Beringia mostly traveling by boat, surviving along
the way with the help of kelp forests and other
coastal resources. So there are still lots of open questions
in that debate.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
But we know this was the corridor for the exchange
of many different species, and we've discussed some examples of
this on the show before, ranging from you know, of
course human beings to also things like species of camel.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
And other things that I didn't even think about until
I was reading for this episode, like the gray wolf,
the exchange of the wolf.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Now, an interesting thing I was thinking about was a
similarity with dogger Land. As we mentioned with dogger Land,
the phrase land bridge can potentially be deceptive. On one hand,
it does sort of accurately describe what happens when sea
levels drop and a ground corridor is established between two
(08:14):
land masses that used to be and or would later
be separated by water. On the other hand, the term
bridge kind of creates the impression of a transitional space
that one merely crosses to get from one side to
the other. Like you don't build a house in the
middle of a bridge. Well, I guess you might if
it's one of those bridges without buildings on it in
(08:36):
Italy or France or wherever. But but you know what
I mean, most of the time, you don't set up
camp in the middle of a bridge.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think this is this is
this is a concept that always kind of comes to
mind whenever I'm reading about land bridges. On some level,
you're imagining it as a situation where like the wolves
and the camels are like, hey, guys, there's a temporary
passage between these two land masses. Let's all go get
at it. And you know, everybody rushes to get from
one side to the other, and then the land bridge
(09:03):
goes away.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Right, So that can be kind of deceptive. In the
case of Doggerland, we know that not only was the
now flooded land inhabited by Neanderthals and later Mesolithic Homo
sapiens during its brief warm period, for the few thousand
years between the end of the Pleistocene and the time
it was under the water, it was probably one of
(09:24):
the most resource abundant places in Europe, and as I
said earlier, it may have been one of the most
densely populated as well. So with that in mind, to
what extent could we also think of Beringia more as
a destination in itself, a place to be, rather than
just a way to get somewhere. Well, in fact, we
(09:45):
know that it was a habitat environment for many terrestrial
plants and animals, and so the real question is to
what extent this would be true for people as well.
So I came across one paper from twenty fourteen, raising
a few lines of evidence for thinking that the large,
now submerged plane in the middle of the Bearing Land
(10:06):
Bridge was actually a relatively habitable refuge for plants, animals,
and people during the last glacial maximum and may have
been home to an isolated population of Native American ancestors
for thousands of years. So the paper is called out
of Beringia question Mark, published in the journal Science in
(10:27):
twenty fourteen by Hoffiker, Elias and O'Rourke, and one of
the core pieces of evidence here is a sampling of
mitochondrial DNA from more than six hundred Native American people
in the present, most of whom shared unique mitochondrial DNA
mutations not shared by their closest relatives in Asia, indicating
(10:49):
that most likely they can trace their ancestry back to
a group of people that was living isolated from people
in the rest of Asia for thousands of years, perhaps
ten thousand years or so, before spreading across the continents
of North and South America. And if this is in
fact the case, where would this population of people be living,
(11:11):
perhaps in a region of Beringia that supported long term settlement. Now,
you might think, but wait a minute, it wasn't Beringia
too cold and arid and free of resources not necessarily.
Palaeoecological evidence is showing that parts of central Beringia may
have actually been more rich in plant and animal resources
(11:32):
that would potentially support continued human habitation. And this evidence
includes things cited by these authors like sediment cores that
you would take from the bottom of the Bering Sea,
so you like core out an area of the sediment
strata there and see what's in it. And it turns
out these sediment samples contain remnants of pollen and other
(11:53):
plant matter and insects that indicate that while outer regions
of Beringia may have been more inhospitable and arid, very
like dry cold step lands, the central lowlands of Beringia
may very well have had plenty of animal populations for
hunting and especially important woody plants which could have been
(12:15):
used as fuel for fires. And as we know, wood
is a big deal. There there was not a whole
lot of wood available in the Arctic at the time
due to the extent the extent of the glaciers, and
fuel for fire can make the difference between a place
being able to sustain human life or not so.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Already we're painting an entirely different picture of a quote
unquote land Bridge than I think a lot of us
might have had in our head right.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
So to quote lead author John Hoffecker, who is a
professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Speaking to Live Science,
he said, quote, the central part of Beringia was probably
the mildest, most comfortable place to live at high latitudes
during the last glacial maximum. It is the most logical
place for a group of people to hunker down, and
(13:03):
the term used for this area is a glacial refugium,
a place where organisms can survive despite hostile conditions in
the surrounding areas. So this might have been a sort
of warmer, milder, wetter area in the middle of very cold, dry,
or glaciated areas that would be able to maintain all
(13:26):
of this diversity of species like shrub trees that you
could burn for wood, and animals that could sustain human hunting,
and possibly people living there for thousands of years. So
the idea of many millennia of people living isolated in
this refugium is sometimes referred to as the Barringian standstill
(13:47):
hypothesis and though it's not meant to. I feel like
this is another one where the word choice brings some
of the wrong connotations, because stand still kind of like
bridge it to me, at least, it implies a connotation
that like, these people would have been trying to get
somewhere and then they were stalled or delayed, rather than
(14:09):
this is simply where and how people were living their lives,
just like anywhere else on earth.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Yeah again, because you're talking about thousands of years here,
You're not talking about again, this brief opportunity to move
from point A to point B. It is instead the
emergence of a point C.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
At least, I feel like the historical perspective we have
often leads to misconceptions like this, Like when you look
back through history, we know or simply have an idea
right or wrong of what happened before and after a
period of time. And with that historical perspective, I think
(14:44):
we often have a hard time understanding that people within
that period probably did not think of themselves as transitional
between two things, but were trying to live their lives
like anyone else. And you know, I was having the
same pattern of thoughts about dogger Land, like we now
know that it was really only this lush buffet of
(15:07):
a world for a few thousand years in Doggerland. But
to the people living there it was it was probably
just home, right.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, I mean to your point, like this was to them,
To them, this was the world. You know, they not
to discount the possibility that they had some oral traditions
or so forth of the places they came from or
the world before. But you know it E'SCW. You know,
hindsight is twenty twenty and that certainly applies to our
(15:35):
understanding of history.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I guess the other way of looking at it is
that on a on a long enough time scale, all
people living in all places at all times are living
in transitional points.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yes, that's interesting to think about because it kind of
comes back to what we discussed in previous episodes about
golden ages, lost golden ages, the thing that that we're
trying to reclaim or try trying to find again. You know,
that also kind of loses side of the fact that
life is is continually a state of change and and
(16:09):
there it's always in a state of transition, and you know,
it reminds me, I forget what talk this was, but
there was a talk that Terrence McKenna gave where he
used the line and if something needs to be done,
you will find yourself doing it, which I think I
forget the exact context of it, but you know, it
kind of speaks to to how human beings have survived
(16:32):
and and and and grown and expanded so much over
the course of their existence. They have expanded into new areas,
they have left areas, they have changed, they have they
have rolled with the punches of transition. And but at
the same time, you know, created these these stories and
looked back longingly at supposed better times, whether or not
(16:53):
they were actually better.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's a good point. But to come back to the
Barringian standstill hypothesis, it is important to remember that this
is just a hypothesis. Like it would need more direct
evidence in its favor, such as especially archaeological discoveries, which
had not been found at the time this article was published.
And I looked around and couldn't find any evidence of
(17:16):
archaeological discoveries backing it up since then, and critics of
this hypothesis argue that not only do we not have
archaeological evidence, we probably should expect to have found some
by now, since not all of this territory is underwater,
though a lot of it is. But either way, so
we don't know. This is an idea, it may or
(17:36):
may not be correct. But if this idea is correct,
once the surrounding glaciers began to melt, the ideas that
the Burringian people probably expanded their territory and then moved
on down the coastline and into the interior of the
North American continent and spread on from there. But the
ultimate point about the land being that much like Doggerland,
(17:58):
this is an area that was land when when the
glaciers were at their peak, when when the water was
locked in the ice, and so there were these vast
stretches of plains that are now buried beneath the sea.
And there's probably a lot more that we could know
about them more easily if it were not underneath the sea,
and we could, you know, just go around and do
digs and look for palaeontological remains, you know, animal remains,
(18:23):
plant remains, and and see if we could find human
tools and remains of what people were doing in these places.
But it's again more challenging because of the water covering things.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Now, yeah, well, that's fascinating. Again, that kind of essentially
kind of turns over this loose idea that I had
in my head of land bridges. So this might be
an interesting general topic to come back to in the future. Now,
(18:58):
in all this talk of some lands and lost islands
in particular that we got into in the last episode,
I thought it might be fun to explore something that
lines up with this concept in a unique way, and
that is the topic of atolls or atalls. You apparently
can say it both ways, and hey, I might just
(19:19):
say it both ways this week proceed here. Uh So,
these are essentially coral reefs in circling a lagoon. They're
not always circular, but there are some stunning examples of
circular atolls, and you can you've you've probably seen pictures
of these. There are numerous examples of them. Big Blue
Hole Belize is one that is commonly mentioned and commonly photographed.
(19:44):
But it's like, yeah, you have this this circular reef
reef islands and then in the middle more water. So
it looks like, you know, this looks like something is missing, right,
And this is certainly invited curiosity over over the many
years here as long as people have been in calendar
them because it raises the question how did they form?
This was actually a question that none other than Charles
(20:06):
Darwin considered on the Voyage of the Ahms Beagle during
the eighteen thirties. So when I was reading about that,
I had to pull open his book, The Voyage of
the Beagle. And yeah, he gets into this at one point,
and he writes about some of the theories of the day
that he was less convinced by. So the first idea
(20:27):
he brings up is that quote, coral building, animals instinctively
built up their great circles to afford themselves protection in
the inner parts. So that would seem to imply that, yeah,
you have coral is like growing up from the seabed
and building a great ring so that they can have
like a protected area in the middle. And on this
(20:48):
theory he points out that, okay, coral don't thrive within
the atl lagoon. And this would be a case in
which quote many species of distinct genera and families are
supposed to come buind for one end, and of such
a combination, not a single instance can be found in
the whole of nature.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
M Okay, So the creatures forming the reef would have
to be all working together to protect this inner area.
But also, he points out, like you don't really see
the coral doing much in the inner area. It's not
like they're, oh, that's the place where they keep all
their soft parts. They're just not really in there.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Yeah. And then additionally, where else in the natural world
do we see this kind of like cross genera cooperation
going on. I mean, I guess you could. You know,
there's some little instances here and there where you talk
about you know, prey animal communication and alerting, you know,
generally to the idea of predators in their myths, but
something a lot on the scale of this, he argues,
(21:46):
we don't.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Really see it, Okay.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
The next theory he mentions is that atolls are based
on submarine craters, and he points out that this doesn't
hold up when you look at all the examples in
the world that were known at the time. It just
simply doesn't account for everything. Another idea that he explores
is the idea that coral edges were exposed to the
outer sea and along these edges grew up more quickly.
(22:11):
But as with theory one, the question remains, what did
they grow on he stresses that rebuilding corals cannot live
at great depth, and therefore, like what would grow up
then to be, it doesn't make sense that they would
start deep down and then grow up, because we know
that these corals that live near the surface don't thrive
in the deep water, right, So.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
It's only in the the shallow. Living corals only live
in these areas that are already shallow for some reason.
Like it's like it's almost an island.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Right right. And it's worth noting that there are deep
water corals and they do produce deep sea reefs, but
it's structurally different, apparently. So he writes at fair length
about all of this and about what he thinks is happening,
And here's a section that more or less encapsulates it. Quote,
as the barrier re slowly sinks down, the corals will
(23:02):
go on vigorously growing upwards. But as the island sinks
this would be the island around which the reef is formed.
He continues, the water will gain inch by inch on
the shore, the separate mountains first forming separate islands within
one great reef, and finally the last and highest pinnacle
disappearing the instant this takes place, a perfect atoll is formed.
(23:26):
I have said, removed the high land from within the
an encircling barrier reef, and an atoll is left, and
the land has been removed. We can now perceive how
it comes that atolls, having sprung from encircling barrier reefs,
resemble them in general size form, in the manner in
which they are coupled together, and in their arrangement in
single or double lines. For they may be called rude
(23:47):
outlined charts of the sunken islands over which they stand.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
M okay. So the idea there would be a volcanic
island that forms, it gradually begins to sink, but as
it is sinking, the barrier reef is built up to
encircle it in the shallow water around it, and that
height comes up as the central island just continues to
go down. So an atoll, to come back to the
(24:13):
idea of sort of transitional landforms, is somewhere in between
a volcanic island and eventually fully sunken island.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Right. And in this case, yeah, the volcanic island is
no longer active and it's falling away. Meanwhile, the coral
is alive and it's building up.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Hm, that makes sense?
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Was he right? Well, it's interesting so that this is
generally referred to as the subsistence model, and it does it.
It seems like it's very much in the mix today.
You certainly see it sided all over the place, and
it pops up in textbooks and so forth. But not
everyone loves it, and there are some very vocal experts
(24:57):
who who say this is really this really does a
explain everything, and we ultimately need to look maybe more
at another theory, or ultimately look at sort of a
host of theories, and that maybe we should get away
from the idea that one theory in general is going
to explain every formation like this that we find in
the world's oceans. There's another key formation theory called the
(25:19):
antecedent Karst model, and this one proposes that dropping sea
levels that this has to do with like cyclical changes
in sea level over time. It proposes that dropping sea
levels expose the top of a flat topped bank of
carbonate rocks, and then while this is exposed again for
(25:41):
life with our land bridge model, not for just a
couple of days, but for an extended period of time,
rain water steadily pools in the flat topped bank and
dissolves some of the carbonate, forming a depression. Eventually, sea
levels rise again and fresh coral builds up a top
this raised circuit edge. Again, roughly speaking, it doesn't have
(26:02):
to be anything remotely resembling a perfect circle. But then
the coral builds up on this raised circular edge of
the depression. This forms the atoll according to this theory.
So again, it has a lot to do with cyclical
changes in sea level.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Oh okay, so much. Kind of like how a cave
is formed in limestone by like rainwater coming down or
water rushing through and dissolving some of the sedimentary rock
and eventually forming a cave. Here, the idea would be
that in the times when a seamount or island top
(26:38):
is exposed by lowering sea levels, the rainwater comes down
and sort of it dissolves it in kind of the
same way that rainwater dissolves a cave cavity, and it
lowers the central area of the island, But of course
the coral is still building up the reef all around
that central raised area.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Yeah, that's my understanding of this. Alexander Witz wrote a
great article about the antecedent Carse model back in twenty
twenty one for Noble magazine and was then reprinted on Smithsonian,
where you can also find it. So I was reading
about that here, and the author makes several key points
that I wanted to draw out for this discussion. First
(27:17):
of all, the author rights that experts that generally agree
that Darwin got it wrong with his theory, they also
admit that he crafted a very insightful theory for the
day given the limited amount of data. Also, some reefs
may have still formed via the method that Darwin is
describing here, such as some atolls found in Tahiti. And
(27:42):
in any case, they often stressed it we shouldn't look
maybe for one unifying theory for atoll formation, because there
may ultimately be a handful of explanations in the mix,
including things like tectonic forces and wave action. Ah.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
That's a good point. Yeah, there could be multiple mechanisms
create similar looking formations.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah. The author also points out that understanding the varying
reasons in play also helps us to understand which atolls
are most at risk from climate change and rising sea levels.
The author writes, quote, in the absence of humans, atolls
can grow at a rate much faster than that of
sea level rise. But people have degraded natural atolls by
(28:22):
introducing pollution and waste, altering the water table, and adding
concrete and asphalt that smothers the underlying coral. The Maldives
in the Indian Ocean face a future of flooding, water contamination,
and erosion that threaten its tourism and fishery industries. The Malieves,
by the way, according to the article, may have formed
more due to the action of waves wave based erosion
(28:44):
than by the clarsification theory that I was talking about earlier,
at least according to one study. But to come back
to just the topic of sunken lands and sunken islands
in general, yea, I think atolls fit into the concept those.
So the added discussion and or disagreement concerns exactly how
central exposed land masses may have formed and or fallen away,
(29:07):
and you know to what extent it involves things essentially,
you know, rising from the ocean or then sinking back
below the depths. Because both Darwin and the carcidification theories
entail a central exposed land mass or island around which
the coreal builds.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
I mean part of me would wonder if you could
just do some extent tell the difference between these by
looking at the kind of rock, because in Darwin's theory,
for example, if the idea is that the island is
volcanic in origin, wouldn't you be mainly looking at volcanic
rock leftover in the middle, whereas if it's a karc
process you would be looking at sedimentary rock in the middle.
(29:48):
Am I wrong about that?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
The article I said it does go into more detail
about this, And yeah, it's my understanding that a lot
of what we know now it does hinge upon geologic
evidence that we just that Darwin wasn't exposed to then
did not have back in the day, And so we
do know a lot more about what sorts of rocks
are underlying any given land mass that we're discussing.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
So I guess if the larcification explanation has come more
into favor, that would suggest that more often the coral
Atoll is found around a like a limestone formation rather
than a volcanic rock formation.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
That would seem to be the case. But again, based
on what I was reading, it sounds like it is
maybe a suite of the theories that we might turn
to as opposed to again one unifying theory for all
of these atolls. Now, as we touched on during the
(30:51):
first episode, I wanted to come back around to this
because water levels don't only rise due to geologic events
and storms and global warming. It also occurs when humans
build dams to form artificial lakes. Well, I mean, I
guess you could maybe make an argument for beavers as well,
but especially humans. That's true, humans can pour concrete, but
(31:15):
you know this allows humans to otherwise manipulate rivers and lakes,
and it's worth stressing that in addition to hydro electricity.
And you'll know this if you've ever visited a dam
and gone through like a you know the educational portion
of the dam in addition to producing electricity. Another major
reason for dams is to often detame rivers that periodically
(31:35):
endanger neighboring and low lying areas. But in doing so
in creating lakes, we of course sometimes sink formerly inhabited lands,
both ancient and modern. And of course this has taken
place all over the world. There are so many examples
that we could turn to, but I thought I might
highlight some examples that stood out to me and of course,
(31:56):
many others come up. We may bring them up later,
and certainly feel free to write in about examples that
come to your mind. But one that is often mentioned is,
of course the site of Abu Simbel in Egypt. This
was an ancient rock cut temple complex near the current
Egyptian Sudanese border, and it dates back to the thirteenth
(32:16):
century BCE. This site was threatened by Lake Nasser. This
is the Aswan Dam reservoir during the twentieth century, but
in nineteen sixty eight it was actually relocated to another site,
so a massive relocation effort to move everything to a
higher elevation further away from the water. Another famous dam,
(32:39):
of course is the Three Gorgeous Dam in China. That
also entailed a great deal of relocation from the area
to be flooded in terms of like the lake that's
going to build up, but also the river itself. And
this also included something called White Crane Ridge. It's an
archaeological site. The inscriptions here date back to the Tung
(33:00):
dynasty and provide detailed water level records on the Yangzi River,
some I think one two hundred years worth of data.
They've done. What I was reading some of the carvings
were relocated, but others remain in a special underwater museum
constructed prior to the flooding. So you apparently this is
underneath the river, so you apparently take an escalator down
(33:23):
from a facility by the riverbank through some tunnels to
reach the museum. WHOA Another example from China that I
ran across is Lion City or Hieching in eastern China.
It's an example of an Eastern Han dynasty city that
is now under the waters of a man made lake.
This is Thousand Island Lake. This was flooded in the
(33:45):
mid twentieth century as well, when most of these projects
are taking place around the world, and it has apparently
become a tourism destination, at least for very experienced divers.
I read that it's not really the kind of thing
that casual divers are going down for, but experienced divers
have sought this out, and you can find some images
online of various sort of you know, haunting underwater remnants
(34:07):
of this place.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
As a creature of East Tennessee, I grew up with
a lot of consciousness of the idea of lands flooded
by the creation of dams, specifically with the TVA hydro Electric.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Yeah, the Tennessee Valley Authority, right, Yeah, things like Kentucky Lake,
there are always a lot of you know, these are
anytime you have a big lake like this, there's gonna
be some sort of relocation effort that has to take place.
And I feel like inevitably you're gonna have some things
left behind beneath the water, and on top of what's
actually underneath the water, you're gonna have stories about what
(34:40):
maybe underneath the water, you know, tales of lost towns
and so forth.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
I think I used to have dreams when I was
little of finding houses submerged underneath the lake.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah. Yeah, And this sort of thing has been explored
in media. He pops up in the Coen Brothers or
brother Where art thou So? Yeah, And I think ultimately,
wherever you're listening to this show, you probably don't have
to go too far to find an example of some
sort of an artificial lake, and there may be stories
about like the impact of creating that lake.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Of course you kind of alluded to this earlier, but
one of the interesting things about the flooding of these
river valleys by the creation of dams. Is that often
one of the purposes of it is to prevent uncontrolled flooding.
I know this is it's fundamentally changed what the Nile
River valley is that they put all these dams in
because there used to be, you know, this uncontrolled seasonal
(35:35):
flooding of the Nile that was just part of life
in Egypt. And now that in some ways the water
level of the Nile has been to some degree broad
under human control.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, and so you see this sort of thing all over.
I have to say, though I know I wasn't familiar
with this example till I started doing research here. There's
perhaps fewer examples, few examples that are as stunning as this.
But there's a town in northern Italy, or a village
in northern Italy by the name of Kuran, and it's
apparently pretty famous for there a lot of images of this,
(36:07):
but I wasn't familiar with it. But this is another
case where they had to relocate the town to a
higher elevation as the original site was flooded in nineteen fifty.
So most of the city was abandoned and demoed first,
except for a lone fourteenth century church and its Bell Tower.
The Bell Tower still sticks out of the water in
(36:28):
rather surrealistic fashion. You'll find images of it where it's
just like, oh, here's the mountains, there's a lake, and
here is a bell tower sticking out of it. I mean,
some of these images don't even look real. It looks
like some sort of obvious photoshop, But these are legitimate.
There are other images of the lake frozen over and
here is the Bell Tower emerging from the ice. Sometimes
(36:50):
you see images where people have ventured out onto the
ice close to it.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
In some of the pictures. I just looked up pictures
of it, and in a lot of them, there seems
to be a gradient on the tower as it sticks up,
like the stone is a little paler for most of
the way up, and then there will be a lower
area where the stone is darker. And I don't know
if this is the reason, but I wonder if that's
you know, it's literally just from the water level going
up and down, and so you can see where the
(37:15):
water has been on the on the height of the stone.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
Yeah, I believe that is the case. I've read that
during the spring, when the water is at its lowest,
you can apparently see more of the ruins. But yeah,
I encourage everyone to look up image of this because
it's pretty impressive and you can't have something in like
this in the world, of course without it inspiring some
level of superstition and in fiction. And sure enough, there
(37:41):
is an Italian supernatural TV drama about this town, or
at least I don't know if it's about the set
in the town and invokes the idea of the town.
It is called Kuron. It's apparently I think it's on Netflix.
I don't know if that's like, if that's in the States,
or if that's just in Italy or other international markets.
But c r o in if anyone out there has
seen it, do write in and let us know. I'm
(38:03):
wondering how they I mean, there's so many directions you
can go in. You're talking about an abandoned underwater church
like that.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
That's perfect well, not to spoil the fund, but to
be clear, I think they removed the church. It's just
the tower that's there, right, or at least in the
pictures I've seen.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
I'm uncertain about that. There may be some ruins down there,
But then again, if you're if you're making a supernatural drama,
TV show. Why not have the church down there? You
can have whatever you like down there. Merphult going to church, ghosts, raiths,
I don't know, there's so many directions.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Oh, it's like the pious undead that we talked about.
Was it last year or the year before? All the
revenants are going to church?
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Yeah, yeah, and there. This is like a rich folkloric
region of Europe too that we're talking about. So there's
so many ideas you could pull in, you know, ideas
that predate the creation of man made lakes for sure.
I also want to point now worth looking up or
images of the Quran coat of arms, because I'm not
sure on the exact history of this, like when they
(39:06):
changed it or adapted it. But the coat of arms
depicts a tower, the Bell Tower, emerging from the water,
so pretty cool. If you have visited this location, right
in and let us know, because I'd love to hear
your first person account of this haunting bell tower. All right,
we're going to go ahead and leave it there, but yeah,
go ahead and write in if you have any thoughts
on anything we've discussed so far in this series. Just
(39:30):
to remind you that stuff to blow your mind is
primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
listener mail on Mondays, usually an artifact or monster fact
episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. If you use social media, you can
follow us at any of your favorite social media sites,
I think, unless we're not on that site, but we're
(39:51):
on a few of them, so you know, to have
a look around, maybe you can find us. If you're
on Instagram, you can find us at stbym Podcast.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Follow us on MySpace. Huge thanks 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.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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