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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

#141

Post by dgellow »

christkv wrote: post #82
dgellow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case people aren't familiar with Ur (I wasn't): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur > Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates,…

You might enjoy this podcast about the rise and fall of the Sumerians https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA

Thanks for sharing :)

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

#142

Post by dgellow »

HappyDreamer wrote: post #90
dgellow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case people aren't familiar with Ur (I wasn't): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur > Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates,…

I also wasn't. Quite depressing laws they had, I think: 6. If a man violates the right of another and deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male. 7. If the wife of a man followed after another man and he slept with her, they shall slay that woman, but that male shall be set free. ... and slaves of course ... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu#Surviving_law... ) Has it been like…

Wow, yeah, that’s pretty awful. Glad I’m living in the modern world where that kind of ruling would be considered an abomination.

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

#143

Post by bandibus »

hnbad wrote: post #134
trenchgun wrote: post #128

Fucking stop using miles. Just. Use . The Ducking. Metric. System.

The title seems to use meters as the article says "anything up to 25 meters". It's a bit jarring how it switches between systems and then gives conversions on some imperial units but not others. It's also odd to read about Europe in measurements like "cubic miles" given there's only one country in Europe using imperial and their system is different from the US imperial. The author is a self-described "Yorkshireman" s…

Yes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged!

(In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)

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

#144

Post by astrange »

HuShifang wrote: post #45
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…

On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have…

Reading about Çatalhüyük (thanks autocorrect for making it properly squiggly) I was struck by how actually different it seems to have been despite being city-shaped.

There aren’t streets, rather everyone supposedly traveled on top of everyone else’s roofs. There were family homes but not public buildings. And they buried their dead family members right inside their own houses and sometimes kept their skulls out for decoration.

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

#145

Post by bandibus »

bandibus wrote: post #143
hnbad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title seems to use meters as the article says "anything up to 25 meters". It's a bit jarring how it switches between systems and then gives conversions on some imperial units but not others. It's also odd to read about Europe in measurements like "cubic miles" given there's only one country in Europe using imperial and their system is different from the US imperial. The author is a self-described "Yorkshireman" s…

Yes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged! (In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it…

(I also wrote about all this in another newsletter, here: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/imperial-vs-metri... This isn't me claiming Britain isn't idiotic on this matter, though...)

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

#146

Post by bandibus »

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).

I got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts):

"Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Storegga-slides

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

#147

Post by astrange »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #65
HuShifang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have…

This seems like unjustified speculation; people could look at e.g. people leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve as an example of how modern Americans are poor at abstraction and have to give literal offerings to their god Santa Claus. AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our abi…

> The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.

Sure it claims way too much, but I don’t think every nearby direction is discredited. That would mean everyone in history had the exact same theory of unitary consciousness we do (that we have free will, our actions come after conscious thought, there’s a conscious/subconscious/unconscious or id/ego/superego, dreams come from our own memories, etc.)

There’s a lot of Buddhists out there to this day, and they do officially belong to a religion with a you-don’t-exist policy. How this is integrated with resurrection depends on the lineage of course.

Myself I just want to know if the Babylonians were taught math by a fish alien named Oannes. Maybe he can tell us if P=NP.

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

#148

Post by astrange »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #103
HuShifang wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it). I…

I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic. Generally every theory which talks about these great leaps in human cognition, and ties these to human "development" while ascribing diminished intellectual capabilities to our ancestors, seems to fall apart after scrutiny (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hyp…

> I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Isn’t something like this the general explanation for the Flynn effect? (that newer generations in modern societies are better at IQ tests because they’re better at IQ test-style abstractions)

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

#149

Post by eesmith »

bandibus wrote: post #146
Merad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts): "Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metr…

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146350031... comments

> The resulting tsunami had run-up heights of around 10–20 m on the Norwegian coast, over 12 m in Shetland, 3–6 m on the Scottish mainland coast. ...

> We compare results from our multiscale model to previous results using constant-resolution models and show that accounting for changes in bathymetry since 8.15 ka, neglected in previous numerical studies of the Storegga slide-tsunami, improves the agreement between the model and inferred run-up heights in specific locations, especially in the Shetlands, where maximum run-up height increased from 8 m (modern bathymetry) to 13 m (palaeobathymetry).

The Time Team episode (mentioned elsewhere here) says the wave at Doggerland was up to 10 meters. https://youtu.be/XTvOcm5dgDI?t=1835 .

The most recent publication I found on the topic is https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2021.7674... :

> The Storegga tsunami has previously been theorized as having brought about a swift and catastrophic end to Doggerland, the submerged palaeolandscape of the southern North Sea (Weninger et al., 2008). However, a more nuanced understanding is beginning to emerge in the wake of numerical modelling of the wave’s dispersal (Hill et al., 2014; Hill et al., 2017), and the discovery of the first confirmed evidence of the tsunami from a submarine context, “core ELF001A” from the “Southern River” submerged river valley, recovered by the Europe’s Lost Frontiers team (Gaffney et al., 2020). Clearly the Storegga tsunami hit some of the coastlines of the southern North Sea with considerable force, but the severity of this impact was probably variable (Walker et al., 2020).

It cites "run-up heights in excess of 25 m recorded in parts of Scotland and Norway".

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

#150

Post by bandibus »

eesmith wrote: post #149
bandibus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts): "Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metr…

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146350031... comments > The resulting tsunami had run-up heights of around 10–20 m on the Norwegian coast, over 12 m in Shetland, 3–6 m on the Scottish mainland coast. ... > We compare results from our multiscale model to previous results using constant-resolution models and show that accounting for changes in bathymetry since 8.15 ka, neglected in previous numerical…

Thanks for that. Yep - I think the widely (wildly) varying numbers are due to there being various models currently being explored. The paper I referred to was recent but not "2020" recent. I'd also trust Gaffney's team's findings as the Lost Frontiers team are at the cutting edge of all this.
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