It contains a lot of diagrams of the wall (fig. 2 and 3), as well as an extensive discussion about whether it could have been produced by natural phenomena (heading "Natural Processes as Origin of the Blinkerwall"). The concluding paragraph of that section:
> Taken together, the aspects discussed above do not ultimately rule out a natural process as the genetic origin of the Blinkerwall. However, for each of the different processes, several unresolved questions remain. We consider a shoreline influenced by drifting ice as least unlikely, whereas eskers, moraines, and tsunami deposits appear highly implausible. Finally, there is one observation that cannot be explained by natural processes at all, and which pointed us toward a possible anthropogenic origin of the structure. This is the preferential location of the largest and heaviest stones at knickpoints along the 971-m-long Blinkerwall.
Such a prehistoric megastructure, a dyke to prevent the flooding of Doggerland in the North Sea, is the subject of the sci-fi novel "Stone Spring" by Stephen Baxter.
This headline immediately reminded me of the book. I very much enjoyed reading this story and the two sequels, and I can fully recommend it!
>The Arabian Gulf has one of the longest and richest seafaring traditions anywhere in the world. Prior to 8,000 years ago sea levels were considerably lower and the land to the north of the Emirates was an open and potentially fertile landscape. This landscape is an untapped resource, offering the prospect of not only ancient wrecks, but discoveries from the distant prehistoric submerged landscape of Abu Dhabi.
>This talk delves into the intricacies surrounding the Arabian Gulf as it relates its' position as an archaeological treasure.
Saltwater is bad, but sediments will protect most of it (hopefully). In general way worse, than on land I would say.
Ideally, something is conserved under dry and oxygenfree conditions. But even in a swamp, without oxygen - amazing things have been found.
The question is probably, was everything covered before the salt water came, or afterwards. And stable. And while in the water with currents that can change, it is possible that everything gets washed free and then covered again over time. Also not good.
(Also exicted about the topic, I am strongly thinking about buying a professional metal detector. Close to where I live, there was one 3000 year old burial site found, I strongly suspect, there are more. And this site, is also not that far from me and 20 m is something you can dive (but I need to train that again))
>Ideally, something is conserved under dry and oxygenfree conditions.
As a result, a disproportionate amount of our knowledge of Roman bureaucracy comes from Egypt, simply because papyrus preserves so well (even accidentally) in so much of the area. It makes research somewhat awkward, because we know Egypt received special treatment in some ways but it's so often a sample-size of one that we don't know if lots of things are an Egypt thing or a Roman-province thing.
I'm guessing the "special treatment" was that they were nerfed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Egypt "Egypt was unique in that its garrison was commanded by the praefectus Aegypti, an official of the equestrian order, rather than, as in other provinces, a governor of the senatorial class." They didn't want another Cleopatra/Mark Antony situation.
Also drag-net fishing and boat anchors are really, really bad to preservation of sites. Unfortunately most of the likely archeological sites are also, for obvious reasons, just off the coast where such activities are common.
I’ll take “may be” quite strongly - there are SO many submerged geological formations such as moraines which have been mistaken for human structures, like the Sarns off the coast of wales.
> However, it was only in September 2021, that we detected a spatially continuous, almost 1-km long, and usually <1 m high morphologic feature in high-resolution shipborne multibeam echosounder data. This elongated structure, that we hereafter refer to as the Blinkerwall
Why "blinker"? Is that German slang for an echo sounder or something?
The Baltic sea has changed shape a lot over the last tens of thousands of years. Sea levels have rised while land has rised too. This video illustrates through animation:
Southeast Asia had a million square miles of prime habitat, now underwater, until only 20,000 years ago. It stretched south/east from Korea, connecting Taiwan to the mainland, east off Viet Nam and south all the way to Borneo, Sumatra, and Java. We call it Sundaland today. Indonesia occupies its mountaintops.
There was time and space enough there for a whole civilization as sophisticated as ancient Egypt to rise and fall and rise again, and finally be submerged. People who lived there, and had to move uphill as the sea claimed their great-grandparents' homes, might retain no hint of their ancestors' achievements.
Something similar could have happened in the middle of the Sahara, and now be under sand dunes, instead. With no trading partners, there would be no expectation of artifacts remaining to be found elsewhere. We might never find any hint of such a civilization, if they existed. ("Atlantis", you may say, but that is just a tale.)
The Amazon rain forest once held tens of millions of people living in major cities, maintaining the whole Amazon basin as an orchard they had domesticated for at least 10,000 years. We had no hint of any of it until barely 50 years ago. What is left of their specialized knowledge, beyond subtle ayahuasca, manioc, and cacao processing? (Sweet potato, anyway, reached the Pacific Islands.) Their civilization was apparently wiped out by the assortment of diseases brought by Europeans, and vanished beneath the unchecked forest in only a century.
We should not believe in anything without evidence, but it would be foolish not to continue seeking such evidence everywhere it might be.
I wasn't aware of the proper name before searching.
When the choices are sensationalist Atlantean headlines or a Wikipedia "debunk" article, I prefer to opt out of drinking cola entirely. There are more stimulating beverages elsewhere.
We have to commit to metric, every inch of the way.
Anyway, from Wikipedia:
"During the most recent ice age (at its maximum about 20,000 years ago) the world's sea level was about 130 m lower than today, due to the large amount of sea water that had evaporated and been deposited as snow and ice, mostly in the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Most of this had melted by about 10,000 years ago."
Well, because you could die in a horrible natural disaster, why wear your seat belt? There are things that "we" can control the effect "we" are having, and there are things that are totally out of "our" control. So we should just not care about the things we can because things we can't exist is just a very strange leap in logic.
Rather than worry, we need to plan for the devastation caused to the people and massive investments in infrastructure that lie within centimeters of the current sea level.
The problem with inferring ancient temperature is you have to rely on sparse proximal data (ie tree rings, ice cores, etc) that is only accurate within 1 or 2 degrees C for estimation and then you have to fill in whatever's missing, geographically and temporally.
Still sometimes the data does indicate sharp, dramatic changes, such as the Younger Dryas, about 12K years ago. After the recent glacial period ended, roughly 14K YA, there was a plunge back to glacial temps over a couple centuries which lasted about 1200 years, then very suddenly the temperature rose almost 20C.
The issue with doubting ancient temperatures, is that one has no faith in the predictions of science for the present, as this is the basis/metric in use.
Putting aside the arguments on the merits of global warming ideology, your logical argument doesnt make sense, the sea rise in question was on the back of an ice age that receeded the waters prior, just because things have multiple causes doesnt mean it invalidates the other.
Also, there is serious evidence that this one is anthropocenic.
And finally, even if it wasn’t, our societies will be affected so much that it is a good investment to work on preventing it.
And finally - Earth had it’s periods when it had o2 contents so low that humans wouldn’t survive, ditto with co2 levels being so high at times that we would feel like in an extremely stuffy room at all times.
In the Baltic, it did happen rapidly, and the lake level variously fell and rose as glaciers melted and flowed and moraines dammed the narrow strait that separates it from the North Sea.
From 14,000 years ago to 6,500 years ago (pre-human), the sea level rose 110 meters. That's 14mm/yr.
From 1880-now (industrial era), the sea level rose ~0.2 meters. Thats 1.4mm/year, an order of magnitude less.
From 2006-2014 ("things are really bad!" era), the sea level rose 3.6mm/yr. About a quarter of how quickly they rose before there was any human intervention at all, yet people will still insist that this rise is due to human behavior.
Ancient sea level rise was so catastrophic to human proto-civilization that to this day the most common cross-cultural ancient mythological remnant is the flood myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth . A sea level rise of even a fraction of that would be similarly catastrophic.
Meanwhile, your argument is a non sequitur. Arguing that the sea level has previously risen faster without human intervention provides absolutely no argument against the fact that modern sea level rise is a result of human activity. We have evidence that the temperature is rising faster now than it has in the past 20,000 years (https://xkcd.com/1732/), curiously coinciding with the advent of the industrial revolution, and we understand well the mechanisms that have caused it and are still causing it.
You're afraid of change. That's understandable. I empathize. Hiding from the truth won't help.
(also note from this data, that the earth was warmer in the first half of the Holocene, we have been trending lower despite the recent mild increases)
Secondly, no we do not have evidence that it's rising faster than any time in the past 20K years. The end of Younger Dryas was a 20C increase in less than a couple hundred centuries.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2312008121
It contains a lot of diagrams of the wall (fig. 2 and 3), as well as an extensive discussion about whether it could have been produced by natural phenomena (heading "Natural Processes as Origin of the Blinkerwall"). The concluding paragraph of that section:
> Taken together, the aspects discussed above do not ultimately rule out a natural process as the genetic origin of the Blinkerwall. However, for each of the different processes, several unresolved questions remain. We consider a shoreline influenced by drifting ice as least unlikely, whereas eskers, moraines, and tsunami deposits appear highly implausible. Finally, there is one observation that cannot be explained by natural processes at all, and which pointed us toward a possible anthropogenic origin of the structure. This is the preferential location of the largest and heaviest stones at knickpoints along the 971-m-long Blinkerwall.