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In the winter of 479 B.C., a tsunami was the savior of Potidaea, drowning hundreds of Persian invaders as they lay siege to the ancient Greek village. New geological evidence suggests that the region may still be vulnerable to tsunami events, according to Klaus Reicherter of Aachen University in Germany and his colleagues. The Greek historian Herodotus described the strange retreat of the tide and massive waves at Potidaea, making his account the first description of a historical tsunami. Reicherter and colleagues have added to the story by sampling sediments on the Possidi peninsula in northern Greece where Potidaea (and...

Call to tighten safety design as scientists admit to being baffled by deadly 100ft rogue waves They are the stuff of legend and maritime myth: giant waves, taller than tower-blocks, that rise out of calm seas and destroy everything in their paths. For years scientists and marine experts have dismissed such stories as superstition. Walls of water do not rise out of the blue, they said. But now research has revealed that 'killer waves' do exist and regularly devastate ships around the world. They defy all scientific understanding and no craft is capable of withstanding their impact. 'Rogue waves in...

Alan E Hayden, the director of more than 200 medieval excavations in Ireland, believes the grouping of islands off the Kerry coast suggests earthquake and tsunami wave style damage... The Times report adds: "A folk tale collected by a teacher in the early part of the last century offers an explanation for local place names connected to a road that ran from Dolus Head through the islands to Skellig. "The road, a pre-medieval structure, is called Bóthar na Scairte, or road of the cataclysm, and it is traceable for some distance on Valentia. In the folk tale the road and...

(Phys.org)—When a huge meteor collided with Earth about 2.5 million years ago in the southern Pacific Ocean it not only likely generated a massive tsunami but also may have plunged the world into the Ice Ages, a new study suggests. A team of Australian researchers says that because the Eltanin meteor – which was up to two kilometres across - crashed into deep water, most scientists have not adequately considered either its potential for immediate catastrophic impacts on coastlines around the Pacific rim or its capacity to destabilise the entire planet's climate system. "This is the only known deep-ocean impact...

From the file of “Things that would really be catastrophic”. Did a meteor have a role in a major shift in Earth’s Climate?The start of the Quaternary period (2.588 million years ago, where the Pliocene became Pleistocene) coincides with evidence of a mega tsunami in the South Pacific.The Eltanin Meteor fell into the South Pacific 2.5 million years ago setting off a (likely) tsunami that was hundreds of meters high and theoretically pushed mass material into the atmosphere which may have contributed to the cooling the globe had already started on. This meteor was hard to detect because it hit...

It's a terrifying vision: A violent eruption of Italy's Mount Etna triggers a massive collapse of one flank of the volcano, sending 35 cubic kilometers of debris--the equivalent of 10,000 Cheops pyramids--hurtling at 400 kilometers an hour into the Ionian Sea. The Big Splash unleashes a 50-meter-tall wall of water that, within a few hours, wipes out coastal settlements across the Mediterranean. This catastrophe happened 8000 years ago--and a Mediterranean monster of similar magnitude could happen again. That's the scenario invoked in an analysis in last week's Geophysical Research Letters. "It was an extraordinary event, probably the largest tsunami unleashed...

About 2,300 years ago, a giant tsunami crashed ashore where New York City stands today. No one knows for sure what caused it, but new clues found in the Hudson River's silt suggest an asteroid slammed into the Atlantic Ocean nearby. Katherine Cagan of Harvard University and a team of researchers found carbon spherules -- perfectly round particles that form in the extreme pressures of an impact -- and other grains of shocked minerals in the sediments as well, but the discovery remains controversial. Some say a wave big enough to leave sediments that far from the coast would have...

Fossil Frank has a hypothesis - inspired by certain shells taken from deep in a limestone quarry abutting the Everglades - that a great tsunami hit Florida about two million years ago. It happened in the evening - and he can prove it. More of this later. Before Frank Perillo became Fossil Frank he was an unhappy mechanic. He hated every day he lay on his back in Ketcham's garage. Winter days were worst, because his hands turned to meat from the cold and the lacquer thinners he used to wash himself. When he jacked up cars, the ice on...

Archaeological work on the island of Gökçeada has revealed that an earthquake occurred in the region 4,700 years ago, followed by a tsunami. Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University Geology Department Professor Doğan Perinçek said they had found the traces of the earthquake and tsunami during works between 2006 and 2008. Gökçek made a statement June 2 after an earthquake measuring 6.5 that occurred on May 24 in the region. He said both he and Professor Halime Hüryılmaz had found traces of an earthquake that occurred in 2680 B.C. following work in the area of Yenibademli. “The earthquake broke the walls of...

Archaeologists believe the remains of burned oak uncovered at the site of the first Sainsbury's in the Highlands to be evidence of an ancient "rest stop". The supermarket and a filling station are being constructed on the outskirts of Nairn, at a cost of about £20m. Headland Archaeologists investigated the site ahead of building work. They radiocarbon-dated the hearth to the Mesolithic period, which started as the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago. ...the archaeologists said the fire appeared to have been made to provide heat and not cooking, because no food waste was found... "The dating of...

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...

Dating a massive undersea slide Sid Perkins From San Francisco, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union Pieces of moss buried in debris deposits along the Norwegian coast have enabled geologists to better peg the date of an ancient tsunami and the immense underwater landslide that triggered it. Carbon dating of the newly unearthed moss suggests that the landslide occurred about 8,100 years ago. Sometime after the end of the last ice age, the largest landslide known to geologists took place off the coast of Norway. Called the Storegga slide, this slump of seafloor sediments included about 3,000 cubic...

Friday, 7 September, 2001, 18:28 GMT 19:28 UK Giant wave hit ancient Scotland By BBC News Online's Helen Briggs A giant wave flooded Scotland about 7,000 years ago, a scientist revealed on Friday. The tsunami left a trail of destruction along what is now the eastern coast of the country. It looks as if those people were happily sitting in their camp when this wave from the sea hit the camp Professor David Smith, Coventry University Scientists believe a landslide on the ocean floor off Storegga, south-west Norway, triggered the wave. Speaking at the British Association Festival of Science in ...

Just over 8,000 years ago a huge landslide occurred off the coast of Norway, known as the Storegga Slide. The event created a catastrophic tsunami, with waves almost half as high as the Statue of Liberty, that battered Britain and other land masses. And now the most accurate computer model ever made of the tsunami suggests that it wiped out the remaining inhabitants of a set of low-lying landmass known as Doggerland off the coast of the UK. A new model by researchers at Imperial College London has revealed the devastating effects of a tsunami caused by a landslide off...

The result of a Danish ice drilling project has become the international standard for the termination of the last glacial period. It ended precisely 11,711 years ago. A Danish ice drilling project has conclusively ended the discussion on the exact date of the end of the last ice age. The extensive scientific study shows that it was precisely 11,711 years ago - and not the indeterminate figure of ‘some’ 11,000 years ago – that the ice withdrew, allowing humans and animals free reign. According to the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) in Copenhagen, the very precise dating of the end of...

EXACTLY what drove two men to pretend to be archaeologists and hack off pieces of the Great Pyramid? Atlantis. It's a tale of cranks, conspiracies and an ancient cartouche. The Great Pyramid of Khufu (also known as Cheops) on the Giza Plateau is the largest pyramid in Egypt and the only surviving example of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The cartouche? It's an ancient red-pigment scribble deep inside the Great Pyramid said to be the linchpin in identifying who it was actually built for. Is it an authentic ancient Egyptian depiction of his name, or a 19th century...

Research has revealed details of the catastrophic Zanclean flood that refilled the Mediterranean Sea more than five million years ago. The flood occurred when Atlantic waters found their way into the cut-off and desiccated Mediterranean basin. The researchers say that a 200km channel across the Gibraltar strait was carved out by the floodwaters... show that the resulting flood could have filled the basin within two years. The team was led by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos from the Research Council of Spain (CSIC)... Using existing borehole and seismic data, his team showed how the flood would have begun with water spilling over a...

Sea level study reveals Atlantis candidate 19:00 19 September 01 Jon Copley It sounds a familiar enough yarn - a lone researcher claiming to have pinpointed the lost land of Atlantis famously described by Plato. But this time there is no mention of "supercivilisations", UFOs or magic crystals. Instead, he has turned the clock back on ancient rises in sea level to reveal an island that matches Plato's story. Plato's works Timaeus and Critias contain the first written descriptions of Atlantis and its watery fate, drawn from stories collected in Egypt. "These texts are the origin of a lot ...

Imagine swimming in an underwater primeval forest that nature has preserved for over 50,000 years. Now you can if you are willing to dive 60 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, 10 miles offshore of Alabama. Experts believe 2005's Hurricane Katrina unveiled what had been buried under ocean sediment for centuries. And it took some curious fishermen to discover it by questioning why there so many fishing congregating in one area. The discovery was made in 2012 but only recently became public knowledge. The find was confirmed when a dive team and experts from Louisiana State University...

Divers have found traces of ancient land swallowed by waves 8500 years ago Doggerland once stretched from Scotland to Denmark Rivers seen underwater by seismic scans Britain was not an island - and area under North Sea was roamed by mammoths and other giant animals Described as the 'real heartland' of Europe Had population of tens of thousands - but devastated by sea level risesBritain's Atlantis' - a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea - has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews. Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that...