Posted on 12/04/2005 2:30:58 PM PST by Fractal Trader
Scientists mapping the seabed under a proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound were stunned by their find: evidence of a submerged forest under 6 feet of mud.
It's hardly the lost city of Atlantis, but the piece of birch wood, the yellowish-green grass, soil, and insect parts appear to be part of a forest floor that lined the coastline 5,500 years ago, before being swallowed by the sea that rose after the last ice age. Nearby is evidence of a drowned kettle pond and marsh.
The find has scientists abuzz because if a preserved forest rests below the sea, maybe artifacts from ancient cultures do, too -- items that could help answer some of the most vexing questions about early people in North America. As more energy projects are proposed off New England, archaeologists say, there will be more opportunity for even bigger finds.
''We've been arguing for years whether there are remnant prehistoric landscapes out there and now we know they can exist," said Victor Mastone, director and chief archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources. ''This means there is the potential to go after the big theory of how did people get here and how they lived."
Cape Wind Associates, which has proposed the wind farm, redesigned the 130-turbine project this year to avoid the discovered area.
So much of the world's water was locked up in glaciers during the ice age, ocean levels plummeted at least 300 feet. New England's continental shelf was exposed and in some places, the coastline extended more than 75 miles from its current location.
[SNIP]
The earliest evidence of Native Americans in New England has come from around this time -- a period when hunters could have walked from Falmouth to Nantucket.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Must the effects of global warming.. for several thousand years..
Dead on.
Another result of the flood that Noah and fam escaped. IMHO
There were probably three major floodings during the Ice Age warmup, each raising the level of the oceans worldwide a hundred feet or more in two weeks or less. A person could hike inland, but there wouldn't be time to hang around and take notes or even to save the bigger items.
yep, all of those cavemen, er I mean cavepeople driving their SUVs and using their CFC propelled anit-perspirant caused global warming and the ozone layer to disappear.
Nope. It happened in three surges 14-15k, 11-12k and 7-8k years ago.
In geological terms it happened overnight. How would man have preceived the event?
If you are really interested and want your view of the world changed forever, read the below linked book by Professor Stephen Oppenheimer.
Eden In The East"The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia"
Stephen Oppenheimer
"The biblical flood really did occur - at the end of the last Ice Age. The Flood drowned for ever the huge continetal shelf of Southeast Asia, and caused a population dispersal which fertilized the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, thus creating the first civilizations. The Polynesians did not come from China but from the islands of Southeast Asia. The domestication of rice was not in China but in the Malay Peninsula, 9,000 years ago."
. "In this ground breaking new book Stephen Oppenheimer reveals how evidence from oceanography, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and folklore overwhelmingly suggests that the lost 'Eden' - the cradle of civilization - was not in the Middle East, as is usually supposed, but in the drowned continent of Southeast Asia."
The drowned continent reffered to by Oppenheimer was in the present day area of Indonesia and was twice the size of present day India. This area would have been an excellent place to spend the Ice Age and humans would have thrived...until everything went underwater. Some have even suggested that this could have been Atlantis. Dr. Robert Schoch thinks the custom of pyramid building originated here and was taken all over the world by these refugees.
Why are the "stunned" by finding a flooded forest in an area I was taught FIFTY YEARS AGO was a sinking coastline?
Have they not bothered to look at underwater topographic maps?
East coast slowly sinking; west slowly coast rising, independent of any actual changes in sea level that would affect both equally, was the accepted theory of the time.
I have not heard that that has changed. Details & time frame, maybe, but not the main principle.
Umm...no.
Somehow you must be confusing this with the posited Black Sea Flood.
The glaciers didn't melt all at once and worldwide sea level wasn't rising a hundred feet in 10 years, much less two weeks.
Once again Noah's Flood has a head-on collision with reality and loses...
The FASTEST the oceans have risen since the last ice age was a rate of about 1.5 inches per year for a short time about 14,200 years ago.
I think the average person doesn't really need to "escape" a 1.5 inch rise in sea level :-)
Ich bin Native American. Some of my ancestors, by the way, were the Folger's, Macy's, Starbuck's, Coffin's, etc. In that, I'm one of thousands--if not hundreds of thousands.
The ancient wood I have is petrified. It must have met up with
(BTW: That's the ONLY wood I have...er...oh,hush-up, self!!!)
**The FASTEST the oceans have risen since the last ice age was a rate of about 1.5 inches per year for a short time about 14,200 years ago.**
Thanks for your first person account. Me, I'm only 51 yrs old. :D
How many times has the scientific community had to 'revise' the their 'findings' and do a 180. Let us count the ways.
Well, not now, I don't a few weeks vacation to rattle them all off. ;-)
I don't know why. That Naragansett stuff sucks. They should take the Viking brew and be quiet.
"In geological terms it happened overnight. How would man have preceived the event?"
We know the answer to this, if we choose to look at it.
Among the Indians of Algonquian stock, which is to say the woodland peoples that reach from pre-settlement Virginia through New England and Quebec into the Great Lakes, there is a common legendarium. It did not come over on the boats with the English and French, but was there when the European settlers came. And where-ever the Europeans made contact with the different, warring tribes of this great Indian family, they encountered (if they cared to listen) the same story.
Anyone who cares to listen to the story or read it can hear it still today, from Pequot and Naragannsett on the coast to Chippewa and Ottawa and Potawotomi far, far inland.
Tribal memories of all of the tribes are of living at the seaside, and of great and terrible floods. Geologically, it is likely that there were barrier reefs, for example at the mouth of Long Island Sound which was originally probably a lake in a low valley, separated from the sea. As ocean levels rose over time, the pressures on the shorelines and reefs increased. Now, if the ocean were as still as water in a sink slowly rising, it could take eons. But oceans are stirred by hurricanes, and when hurricanes tear at coasts, sand bars and reefs give way, and water can rush in through the broken natural dams suddenly and do great devastation, and never recede.
When the tsunami struck Asia, the Andaman Islanders all survived. Why? Because a legend of antiquity out of mind, passed orally from generations, was that when the ocean went out, all must head to higher ground. And when the ocean surged away after the Sumatran Earthquakes, true to their legends and taboos, the Andaman Islanders all left their villages and headed into the hills. And when the great surge came, they were all safe on high ground, and they all survived, while an hundred thousand moderns died all along the coasts.
The religious traditions and tribal histories of the Algonquian peoples REMEMBER when the coastline was farther out. They REMEMBER when a flood came and they fled inland. The Chippewa have been in Michigan since the time of the pyramids, and yet they remember, if you ask them (or rather, if you read the records that were left by the French in first contact with them), they remember living by the sea, and they remember the departure from floods, they remember that Gitchee Manitou told them that they would know they had found their new home in the place where the rice grew, and when they reached the great lakes, of course, in the lowlands and bogs there is wild rice growing free everywhere. And they saw the rice and they settled there forever. And are still there.
The Pequots and Naragannsetts REMEMBER when the wall broke and the Long Island sound flooded.
We don't have to speculate how man perceived this. We have 50 tribes independently telling us their own variant of the story.
Our problem is that we forget about hurricanes and massive underwater earthquakes and sand bars giving way and rapid changes that happen, and because we discount our the Jewish flood history (because we desire to extricate ourselves from the influences of Jewish and Christian religion, perhaps), we then discount - no, indeed, we completely IGNORE, fifty tribes who tell the same story of the flood that came at the end of the last ice age, which cause them to disperse all across the newly-opened lands of the woodland (why didn't they go before? Because for thousands of years it had been covered in ice. Even today we don't send expeditions to the interior of Greenland every year to see if, perhaps, somewhere a valley has been exposed and flowers are blooming. We assume that things are as they have been.
The legendarium of the Indians tell of the flood and the migrations that it caused. If we read them, and see how they all remembered the same thing, from different perspectives up and down the coast and inland, we know that it happened and what it was like.
Eden is underwater.
Tibikak ishkwata.
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