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City Beneath The Sea

Posted by timothy on from the musta-been-a-heckuva-milk-carton dept.

gergi writes: "Found this story over at abcnews. Seems some scientists found a city they weren't sure even existed, Herakleion, that used to be at the mouth of the Nile, now underwater 3.5 miles offshore." They're blaming an earthquake for the city's disappearance. The dig (swim?) has been going on for a few years now, but now some of the impressive finds are being announced. Public exhibitions are promised for a couple of years from now.

4 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Uh-oh... by Zaphod+B · · Score: 2

    Hmm... at mouth of large waterway... destroyed by earthquake... hidden for millenia under water... statues of large people wearing women's clothing... maybe it's time to rethink that move to San Francisco.


    Zaphod B
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    Zaphod B
    When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have /bin/cp
  2. a bit o' irony by hamburger+lady · · Score: 2
    Today, they showed off some of their most impressive finds atop a barge, including 20-foot-tall pink granite statues representing a pharoah, a queen and Hapi, the Nile goddess of flooding;

    well, isn't that a bit ironic?

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    Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
  3. Re:Alternate theory to why the city disappeared by Yazeran · · Score: 2
    Sorry, but you misunderstand the theory of continental drift.

    It is right that the continents drift with an average speed of 4 cm/year, but it is only at the boundry-zones (like San-Andreas in California) that the shift is observed. Within the plates, there is no lateral shift of one city relative to one other. Neither is the coastline a plate boundry. The plate boundry between Africa and Europe is much further north (between Cypres and Tyrkey), therefore shift along this boundry cannot be responsible for this.

    Vertical shifts on the other hand, vould be exspected and observed in any large river delta, due to the constant addition of fresh sediments.
    These loads the underlying crust, and is responsible for slow subsidence (as observed at the Mississippi delta). The reson for subsidence due to addition of material is that the earth's crust is isostatically compensated, that is it 'floats' on the denser mantle.

    Such downwarping of the continental edges at large river-deltas most likely has drowned a lot of prehistoric cities.

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

  4. Re:Alternate theory to why the city disappeared by number+one+duck · · Score: 2
    Continental drift is an unlikely culprit, but the ice ages have done a very similar thing (although they are unlikely to be the factor here). Most of the likely relics of the original inhabitants of the Americans... pre-indians, or whatever they could be called, are on the former coast, off in the pacific ocean. The same process that made the land bridge between siberia and alaska also gave us a few extra miles of coast, all the way down.