itdonmatter User ID: 179609 United States 01/09/2007 05:22 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | How Long Can You Tread Water? “Yes, it happened right here,” I mumbled, digging my toes into the sand.
“You mean, the bells were ringing under the sea?” quizzed Josephine.
I looked out over the waves. “Yes, down over there.”
Have you heard about Dunwich? That great British city in the days of King Alfred (remember him, the “cake-burner”?)
Dunwich in East Anglia was a bustling town.
And in the reign of Henry II, it had a royal palace and more than 200 churches.
Among sailors and merchants its market was known all over Europe.
Dunwich was so important, it used to return TWO members of parliament.
Imagine a great city like this being slowly but surely swallowed up by the greedy sea.
In 1347, more than 400 houses and as many shops and windmills were engulfed.
When Sir Francis Drake was fighting the Spaniards, scarcely a quarter of the fine old city was left.
At last, all that remained of Dunwich were the cracked and battered walls of the Church of All Saints. For years it hung poised on the very edge of the cliff – and then one day crashed into the sea beneath.
The low cliffs are still crumbling away by five to six feet annually.
BELLS THAT RING UNDER THE SEA
Fishermen reported that during storms the bells of lost churches could be heard pealing as the sea currents surged through the bell towers.
Can you imagine this:
Coastal erosion along a strip of the Yorkshire coast of England has resulted in the loss of 35 towns since Roman times.
That’s right, 35 towns!
Do you have an atlas? Okay, see if you can find this:
Look for the narrowest part of the English Channel, namely the Strait of Dover. Close to the English coast you may see marked the Goodwin Sands, a line of sandbanks just beneath the water.
These sandbanks are all that is left of the vast estate of Earl Godwin, father of King Harold.
All this land, with its park, cattle, sheep and deer, sank beneath the waves 900 years ago.
The Dover Strait is still widening by about one foot a year.
There are, of course, places where land has been built up with earth eroded from other sites. But the overall result has been loss of land. SOME OTHER RECENT INUNDATIONS
* Denmark: Off the coast of Denmark is the small island of Nordstrand. It is the last trace of a large tract of rich farmland that, as recently as 300 years ago, was covered by an inrush of the sea. Six thousand people and their homes were swept away.
Holland: In the 13th century, the slowly rising North Sea suddenly rushed inland over parts of low lying Holland and formed the big inlet called the Zuider Zee, destroying 30 villages and 80,000 people. In the 19th century, the Dutch reclaimed this rich land with dykes.
* England: During the reign of Henry II, one of the most important seaports of England was Shipden in Norfolk on the east coast. It had a large and beautiful church famous all over England. Five hundred years ago, Shipden was swallowed up by the sea – church, dock and all.
GRADUALLY RISING SEAS
Of course, not all underwater ruins found today have resulted from the rising sea level.
In some cases the land actually sank under. Nevertheless the rising ocean is still slowly but steadily wearing away the coastlines of the world.
Generally the erosion is scarcely noticed. At times, however, the waves suddenly gulp down wide stretches of land without warning.
Some time back, I was invited to conduct a seminar series in the Solomon Islands in the south west Pacific.
One of the folk told of a low-lying island in the Solomons which was recently abandoned by its inhabitants, due to a rising sea level.
Currently the sea level is rising at the rate of 1.5 feet (45 centimetres) per century.
Recent predictions are for a dramatic increase in this rate very soon.
It’s a pity… some of our most exotic low-lying tropical islands seem next in line to be swallowed up.
Want to see some special place before it disappears? There’s probably no need to rush to your travel agent… not yet.
Actually, the world’s sea level has been inching up for the past 4,000 years.
This has been caused by (a) the melting of the post-Flood ice and (b) the gradual evaporation or outflow of post-Flood inland basins to the sea.
The gradual rise of the oceans is thus another ongoing consequence of the Deluge.
Flood waters left behind on the land, in the form of ice or inland lakes, have been gradually returning to the oceans.
The result has been not only a drying out of the land, but a corresponding rise in sea level.
SURPRISE ON AN OLD MAP
The Hadji Ahmed map of 1559, whose original source dates back thousands of years, shows a landbridge between Siberia and Alaska, which existed when the original map was drawn.
If the ocean between these two land masses were lowered 100 feet today, there would be a dry-land path between them.
According to some oceanographers and geologists, the ocean level may have been as much as 500 feet lower than today.
Ireland was connected with England; the North Sea was a great plain; Italy was joined to Africa, and exposed land cut the Mediterranean into two lakes.
Since then, the rising seas have engulfed coastal land and islands, turning isthmuses into straits and large islands into underwater plateaus.
Along many of the world’s shorelines are lost islands, now deep below the sea, with remains of cities, palaces and temples. OVERFLOWING ONTO THE CONTINENTAL SHELF
In fact, most of the continental shelf, which marks the true boundaries between the ocean basins and the continental areas, now lies under a mean depth of 430 feet of water.
It ranges from 300 feet to about 1,500 feet.)
The present continental shelf probably defines the edge of the oceans as they developed during the post-Flood glacial peak.
With the ice melt and the draining or evaporation of inland basins, the seas rose, with minor fluctuations, to their present level.
The ocean basins can thus be characterized as overfull – water not only fills the ocean basins proper, but extends out over the low margins of the continents. So concludes a panel of geologists.
Oceanographers and geologists generally agree that a dramatic, rapid rise of water occurred several thousand years ago.
This has slowed to about 1.5 feet per century. UNDERSEA CANYONS
Around the world’s coastlines are undersea river canyons, which were once above the ocean. Such canyons cannot be cut underwater. * The submerged Hudson Canyon, one hundred miles long and hundreds of feet deep, could only have been formed above water when this extension of the Hudson River was dry land.
* Off the coast of Europe are the Loire, Rhone, Seine and Tagus canyons. The drowned Rhine Valley runs under the North Sea to disappear between Norway and Scotland – showing that the North Sea was dry land.
* Numerous other canyons were cut at the edge of the former ocean basin (now submerged): La Plata in Argentina, the Delaware and St. Lawrence in North America, the Congo in West Africa.
* Off the African west coast are submerged river canyons whose rivers no longer exist in the now-arid land.
All these canyons were cut out above water. Now they are submerged.
ANCIENT MAPS SHOW NOW-DROWNED ISLANDS
The curious Buache map was copied from sources whose origins are lost in antiquity.
This ancient “treasure map” portrays correctly the location of the Canary Islands and the correct outline of an underwater plateau which formed their extended shape before the oceans rose.
Anciently, the Greek islands would have been larger and more numerous, as well.
The Ibn Ben Zara map of 1487 (likewise copied from charts apparently thousands of years old) does in fact show many islands which are now under water.
OCEAN POURED INTO MEDITERRANEAN AND BLACK SEA
In fact, there is evidence suggesting that as the ocean level rose, it back-filled the Mediterranean.
And as the Mediterranean rose, it back- filled the Black Sea. Consequently, a number of post-Flood roads and settlements became permanently submerged.
This explains the drowned remains found in the Black Sea by Russian scientists in the 1950s and later by Robert Ballard.
During an exploration of the seabed, Soviet archaeologists discovered the legendary town of Diosuria at the bottom of the Black sea, off Sukhumi.
Then, in September, 2000, at 311 feet beneath the surface of the Black sea, Ballard’s team, with a submersible, discovered a collapsed man-made building with planks and beams.
Ballard said, “If you drained it back, it would be rolling countryside with meandering streams. We located the countryside and located the river systems.”
The media saw this as evidence of a local flood that may have inspired the biblical story of Noah.
How little do they know! Ballard did NOT find evidence of that Great Flood.
What Ballard found was a post-Flood regional catastrophe that occurred several hundred years after the world-wide Flood – when melting glaciers raised sea level until the waters of the Mediterranean breached the natural dam of the Bosphorus.
Sea water which had first come in from the Atlantic to fill the Mediterranean, now from the Mediterranean poured into the Black Sea basin.
It poured in at 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. The heavier salt water plunged to the bottom of the existing fresh water lake and began to fill the basin like a bathtub.
This rising lake-sea inundated and submerged thousands of square miles of land, destroying local communities, killing people and wiping out plants and animals.
But that was NOT Noah’s Flood. DROWNED CITIES
In the Mediterranean, silting – as well as uplifting – of land has occurred - so that some ancient ports, such as Ephesus, Priene and Miletus are now miles from the sea.
And the remains of the former ancient harbour city of Phalassarna, in Crete, lie 20 feet above sea level, on the cliffs!
Conversely, other ruins, such as a temple at Pozzuoli on the Adriatic Sea’s Gulf of Venice have sunk… then come back up again. This temple now shows the distinct holes left by underwater borers from its prolonged immersion 20 feet under the sea!
In the Mediterranean, earth movements resulting from earthquakes and volcanoes account for most of the submerged cities, but not all.
Because of the general rising of the water level of the Mediterranean, large sections of cities well known to history are now under water.
Among these are Baise (a sort of ancient Las Vegas), numerous points along Italy’s western coast, cities along the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, parts of Syracuse in Sicily, Lepis Magna in Libya, as well as the ancient harbours of Tyre and Caesarea.
There are more than 250 known drowned cities in the Mediterranean.
Helike is believed to lie on the sea bottom near Corinth.
In ancient times this sunken city was a tourist attraction for Roman visitors to Greece.
They used to pass over it in boats, admiring the ruins visible through the clear water. The statue of Zeus, still standing, was clearly visible on the bottom.
The small island of Malta, with its giant megaliths, gives evidence of having once been part of a larger, now drowned, land. ROADS DISAPPEAR INTO THE DEEP
A thousand feet offshore from the island of Melos are the ruins of an ancient city at a depth extending to 400 feet.
>From it there branch out roads, descending even deeper – to unknown destinations.
Jacques Costeau found on the sea bottom another paved road far out in the Mediterranean.
Sicily was once joined to Italy by land over which ships now sail.
DROWNED MINES
Five miles directly offshore from Marseilles, on the French Riviera, at a depth of 80 feet, divers have found horizontal and vertical mining tunnels, smelting facilities and slag heaps lying outside the shafts.
HANNIBAL’S DROWNED CAMP
The camps that Hannibal used as a staging area prior to his invasion of Rome lie under shallow water off Peniscola, on the eastern coast of Spain. |
Anonymous Coward User ID: 179611 United States 01/09/2007 05:27 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: How Long Can You Tread Water? thank you for this. interesting it is.
so how many new islands have been made? if there is one, isn't there the other? lost vs new land? |
Mickey blue
User ID: 170038 United States 01/09/2007 05:39 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: How Long Can You Tread Water? Papua New Guinea is disappearing as we speak,the islands in the region. The Netherlands has addressed this by raising the dikes to 42feet,twice the height they were and rewilding their major rivers. You had better visit Venice soon,too. I live above Sacramento,California which is 15' above sea level and protected by levess,over a hundred years old. The system is guaranteed to look forward to massive flooding problems in the future and we are compared to New Orleans as a future problem. Good material and most interesting. Knew most of it but not all of it so thanks alot. Spike |
itdonmatter (OP) User ID: 179609 United States 01/09/2007 05:52 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: How Long Can You Tread Water? Your most very welcome...
Glad you injoyed truth. |
shell User ID: 174613 United States 01/09/2007 08:33 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: How Long Can You Tread Water? thank you! |
Anonymous Coward User ID: 173064 United States 01/09/2007 08:57 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: How Long Can You Tread Water? Who drew the map of the Antartic.
It was post flood, but without the ice and snow? |
Anonymous Coward User ID: 179628 United States 01/09/2007 09:12 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: How Long Can You Tread Water? Your most very welcome...
Glad you injoyed truth.
Quoting: itdonmatter 179609May I shne your shoes, sir? |