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Tue 24 Apr, 2007 12:14 am
Quote:Lost Country puts Climate Change on the Map
Scientists at the University of Birmingham have unearthed a stark warning from the bottom of the sea on the speed of climate change and how we could suffer the effects over the next century.
Researchers have used new, advanced technology to map and explore a lost prehistoric world deep beneath the North Sea - the results of which could fundamentally change our attitudes towards global warming.
In the largest survey of this kind ever, researchers have analysed seismic data, originally collected for oil exploration to map a 23,000-km2 expanse under the North Sea. The stretch of water was created between 18,000 and 7,000 BC, when the effects of global warming induced sea levels to rise, swallowing the vast, inhabited plain that had stretched to the Norwegian coast.
It is the scale and speed of the flooding that is most shocking, particularly today with the stark threat of the impact of global warming, because what happened to this immense expanse also resulted in a real human tragedy.
Professor Vince Gaffney, Chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics at the University of Birmingham, who worked on the project summarises: "In 10,000 BC hunter-gatherers were living on the land in the middle of the North Sea, by 6,000 BC Britain was an island. The area we have mapped was wiped out in the space of 4000 years."
Whilst the catastrophic invasion of waters was devastating, its rapidity did cause the preservation of one of the most extensive prehistoric landscapes in Europe - and perhaps the world. This has enabled researchers at Birmingham to map and explore an area the size of Wales as it appeared around 10, 000 BC.
The scientists have mapped coastlines, rivers, marshlands and hills throughout the project - areas that would have been home to the hunter-gathers of Europe. Whilst the impact of global warming would have been slow overall, its effects could at times have been terrifyingly fast, with whole territories disappearing within the memory of generations.
Most shocking of all however, these changes occurred as a consequence of climatic change equivalent to the rate predicted over the next century.
Professor Gaffney says the results should provide a stark warning: "At a time when global warming and sea level rise are now accepted as amongst the greatest threat to our lifestyles, the fate of the landscapes and peoples of the North Sea may yet be interpreted not as an academic curiosity but as a significant warning."
The project is featured on Britain's Drowned World: Time Team Special, to be broadcast on Channel 4 on Tuesday 24 April at 9pm.
Report in today's The Guardian
The Independent:
An island made by global warming
I will read more of this post later.
My comment may be off beat for the thread but I once heard it suggested that the first inhabitants of the British Isles walked there during the Ice Age.
The cause of the sinking of the North Sea and the rise of the Alps from a sea bed could be the result of Tectonic Plate shift as the Continent of Africa is drifting northward butting against Europe. The Mediterranean Sea could have also been sunk as Europe is wrinkled by the pressure. Same with the Himalayas formerly a seabed as the subcontinent of India pushes northward against Asia.
During the Ice Age the Bering Sea could be crossed as the sea level was lower. I doubt that further Global Warming could raise the sea level much more than 2 or 3 feet as there isn't that much ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans. When ice melts it shrinks in volume to water as ice has lower specific density than water.
water only decreases in volume for a small range from about 0 to 4 C it expands as ice gets colder and it expands as water gets warmer beyond that range. (This experiment can be tried at home, fill a bottle and freeze it, then fill another bottle and warm it (dont boil). In both cases youll have ecess water out the top as ice or warm water)
The flooding of old habitable lands by melting glaciers has always fascinated archeologists re, the fairly ahallow abyssal plains of the North Se. Now, apparently they have some more evidence.
I wonder whether the Ice maximum(well before this period) had spurred some of these intrepid paleoexplorers to move westward to the "New World". Weve seen evidence in specific populations of Great Lakes "Indians" that their DNA is unlike that of the "bering strait" explorers or the Clovis First cultures and is more like Europeans .
After all, the distance from the "Celtic Seea" to the Flemish Cap (where the Newfoundland rise and the Grand BAnks begin, is only the distance between Maine and Cape Hatteras (Im assuming that the flemish Cap and the grand banks would similarly be high and dry). A small craft could "Coast" sail around the ice fields and land periodically.
I think with each of these new findings that the possibility for earlier populating the Americas than Clovis Culture dictates is ever increasing
I have heard the idea that there were many migrations from both Europe and Asia.
Would not the DNA of native Americans tell us if they came from Europe or Asia?
yeh, I mentioned that some specific Huron tribes have DNA similar to Europeans and not the classic "Type o blood types " and associated DNA of the Amerinds.
That's interesting on a variety of levels. The Solutrians, who were users of the pressure flake method of flint knapping, may have been the migrants from whom the Huron/Iroquoian bands were descended, and were probably responsible for the "Clovis points" which have been found in North America. There is something else interesting, as well. The Huron/Iroquoians were in the valley of the St. Laurent at the time that Jacques Cartier visited, or at least so it seems, the evidence being the vocabulary which Cartier recorded, and which 19th century linguists stated was a Huron/Iroquoian language. When Champlain arrived at the beginning of the 17th century, the Huron/Iroquoian bands had been pushed to the south or the west by the arrival of the Algonquian bands. Those Algonquians who lived near the Hurons called them "the grandfathers," and attributed their own use of agriculture and improved weapons and hunting methods to their contact with the Hurons. Algonquian bands to the east of the Québec region were far more primitive, and did not practice agriculture, and the reports of the French and of English and Portuguese fishermen was that these primitive and impoverished bands faced starvation every winter.
The Iroquois were the inveterate enemies of the Algoquian bands, and the alliance of Champlain to the Ottawa, and an attack on an Iroquois war party lead to an eternal hatred of the French on the part of the Iroquois. The Iroquois twice invaded Canada, once occupying the "province" of New France for two years in an attempt to exterminate the French.
I didn't know about the DNA differences of the Huron/Iroquoian bands, and it raises some very interesting questions. Were they descended from the Solutrians? None of this is to suggest that the Algonquians were necessarily inferior to the Huron/Iroquoian bands. After all, the Algonquians appear to have invented the birch bark canoe, which was a technological development of vast significance--the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company used birchbark canoes in the fur trade well into the 19th century. The Iroquois, with their eternal hatred of the Algonquians, and particularly the Ottawa, never used the birchbark canoe, and, in fact, marched overland to make war.
Re: North Sea yields secrets of early man's happy hunting gr
Walter Hinteler's source wrote:It is the scale and speed of the flooding that is most shocking, particularly today with the stark threat of the impact of global warming, because what happened to this immense expanse also resulted in a real human tragedy.
I wanted to take exception to this. In my never humble opinion, 4000 years does not qualify as an event occurring at "shocking speed." As for "a real human tragedy," i suspect that 4000 years was enough time for old stone age people to get out of the way, and to set up elsewhere.
Even modern man, with all his flaws and deplorable dependence upon artificial systems might reasonably be expected to accommodate change at that "speed" and on that scale.
A recent PBS show -- can not remember whether it was under the aegis of Secrets of the Dead or Nova -- explored the notion of other migrations to the Americas, pretty much shot down Clovis-first, brought up the Solutrians (or however it is spelled) and some DNA variations.
QWe did discuss this on another thread but after Walter posted ,I, like the anal probe I am, went to my AGI "Seabottom carts and noted the depths in meters from the Celtic Sea (truncated by the Porcupine Ridge) to the vast abyssal plains and trenches of the Atlantic, then to be picked up at the Flemish cap and the Grasd Banks which are similarly shallows which were probably dry land at the same time. So The actual Total Sea mIles may have been only about 1500 , and not over 3500 . I know that stone axes and some other artifacts had been brought up in fishing nets in the Grand Banks years ago.
The Salutrian people had a "patent" on those finely flaked and haft grooved points, thats why the similarities of those from places like Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill more look like Salutrian stuff than cthe Folsom points which were a little "hammier" looking.
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