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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

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Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#121

Post by dredmorbius »

saalweachter wrote: post #52
7speter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good chance that the glaciers might have also grounded whole societies as well

Eh, that doesn't get you much. Glaciers weigh heavy on the minds of North Americans and Northern Europeans, but they didn't reach much further -- no civilization south of, say, 40N would be obliterated by the glaciers themselves such that we would expect no trace to remain today. Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civi…

The fact that civilisations tend to cluster near shorelines and waterways means that the impacts of sea level rise would likely be quite significant. Particularly at eliminating incidental traces of, say, groups or cultures migrating along such coastlines. I suspect virtually all of the early migrations of native Americans would be so affected, especially along the west coast of the Americas.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#122

Post by dredmorbius »

arbitrage wrote: post #7
greatpostman wrote: post #4

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the c…

Your suppositions are interesting, but there's simply no proof of them.

There's actually pretty solid archaeological evidence of at least the cognitive capacities which would prefigure in civilisation through toolmaking and their complexity.

This is a long but highly informative presentation by Sander van der Leeuw from 2012:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug

Relevant segment begins at about 8m30s.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#123

Post by dredmorbius »

robscallsign wrote: post #99

I'm curious if anyone has a similar image of the shoreline of the west coast of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington state, etc.

Try searching for "last glacial maximum" and keywords such as "coastline" "sea level", etc.

This is a collection of plausible renderings:

https://pammack.sites.clemson.edu/lec392/earley2.html

Channel Islands off the coast of present-day Santa Barbara, CA.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-northern-Channel-Isl...

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#124

Post by melissalobos »

mrdatawolf wrote: post #113
medstrom wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please specify, what do you mean by "less advanced"? I doubt a randomly picked person has a more complex net of social interactions today than 50,000 years ago - probably the personal level is a lot simpler today, since we can outsource many needs to corporate and national structures, with whom you also have pretty straightforward relations.

"I doubt a randomly picked person has a more complex net of social interactions today than 50,000 years ago..." Why? 50k years ago the average person lived with a small group of people and barely ever interacted with anyone else in the world. Whereas the common person, today, interacts with a large number of people socially; if you include virtual and physical interactions.

> Why? 50k years ago the average person lived with a small group of people and barely ever interacted with anyone else in the world.

I think at least some of the people in this thread would argue against that, seeing as how it is about the idea of advanced or at least extant cities in the distant past. That would be exactly one of the points being argued on.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#125

Post by versteegen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #64
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

“qualia” are the internal experiences of sensory perceptions of the subject, “qualities” are the attributes of the subject. They look a bit similar, and are etymologically connected, but their denotations are about as far apart as is possible for words that are the same part of speech.

Qualia are not limited to sensory perceptions. We have conscious experiences of things internal to our minds too, such as emotions and thoughts and memories and these too have qualia.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#126

Post by Merad »

rurban wrote: post #100

Turns out it was about 2.5m. Off by factor 10. And only a wild theory for the disappearance of Doggerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

Where are you getting the 2.5m figure from? The article you linked doesn't give a figure as far as I can see, but it says sediments have been found 4m above _current_ tide levels and that water went 29km inland in Scotland. Both of those figures seem to be at odds with a relatively small 2.5m tsunami (for comparison, the Fukashima earthquake produced a 15m tsunami).

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#129

Post by eesmith »

Merad wrote: post #126
rurban wrote: post #100

Turns out it was about 2.5m. Off by factor 10. And only a wild theory for the disappearance of Doggerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

Where are you getting the 2.5m figure from? The article you linked doesn't give a figure as far as I can see, but it says sediments have been found 4m above _current_ tide levels and that water went 29km inland in Scotland. Both of those figures seem to be at odds with a relatively small 2.5m tsunami (for comparison, the Fukashima earthquake produced a 15m tsunami).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146350031... (reference [13] from Wikipedia) comments:

> The north-eastern coast of the UK experienced waves between 3–6 m, much like the eastern coast of Scotland ... Wave heights are predicted to be around 1 m on the UK coast and up to 5 m on the northern coast of Doggerland. The maximum elevation of Doggerland here is less than 10 m, with large areas of less than 5 m. It is therefore possible that much of Doggerland would have been flooded by such a wave.

In reading now about the factors involved in this work, one issue is the amount of post-glacial rebound. While I've found that Scotland has rebounded a lot, I can't figure out how much that has been since 8,000 years ago. If I read figure 1 of http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/152.pdf correctly, the Bridge of Earn, Firth of Fourth was 4 meters lower, relative to sea level rise back then.

I also know that geography can cause tsunamis to have local effects which are much stronger than average, as when a narrowing bay channels the wave upward. But I have no clue how that relates to the deposits seen in Scotland.

Edit: and figure 3 seems to say Dogger Bank was 6 meters higher (relative to sea level) than now, again, due to post-glacial rebound effects.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#130

Post by simonh »

labster wrote: post #112
simonh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been many floods in many places throughout history, including the Mediterranean and Middle East. There is no evidence specifically for a global flood with all the very specific characteristics of the biblical flood, or the Mesopotamian flood myth it’s almost certainly based on. That doesn’t mean these mythical floods had no basis in fact, and weren’t inspired by real floods. It just depends how literally y…

Right. If you lived near a lake in the endorheic basin at the end of the Danube, it would sure seem like the whole world had flooded when the Black Sea came flooding in. Protip: the Bible can still be the literal word of God, because omnipotence implies the ability to use simile, metaphor, analogy, symbolism, and storytelling tropes.

As well as inconsistent and even self-contradictory.
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