Marine Life Talk – Southampton Oceanography Centre, 6th June 2002 at 7.15pm
3,000 Submarine Cities and Prehistoric Caves by Dr Nic Flemming OBE
Earthquakes and global sea level change caused by the Ice Ages drowned many hundreds of coastal towns, villages, and prehistoric occupation sites.
As well as the Mesolithic settlement discovered at a depth of 11m under the Solent, there are about 2300 submerged Mesolithic and Palaeolithic settlements in Danish waters, Baltic and North Sea, about 500 submerged classical cities of Greek, Roman, and Phoenician origin in the Mediterranean, and several hundred submerged towns, villages, and prehistoric settlements as far afield as Bulgaria, Israel, France, Japan, Australia, British Columbia, and Florida.
Most of these archaeological sites under the sea have been inundated during the last 40,000 years, but one group of Palaeolithic Hand Axes has been found by divers off Cape Town, and they are about 1 million years old.
Dr Nic Flemming OBE, has published over 50 academic papers on submerged cities and drowned prehistoric caves and villages. He learned to dive in the Royal Marines, and mapped his first underwater city in 1958. He believes that truth is stranger than fiction.
Nic has recently retired from being Director of EuroGOOS, an Association of Agencies, founded in 1994, to further the goals of Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). GOOS was launched at the Second World Climate Conference in 1990, promoted by the following UN Agencies: Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). It provides the ocean component of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS).
