From the Vault: The Sunken Lands, Part 2
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Hello and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick. Rob and I are out this week, so we are going to be continuing our Vault series, which began last Saturday on The Sunken Lands. So today's episode is going to be part two of that series. This originally published November 30th, 2023. Enjoy. Intro

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series called The Sunken Lands, about places where what was relatively recently dry land has now vanished beneath the waters. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the history of

with the idea of lands and especially human civilizations, occupied lands that were swallowed by the sea. The most famous of these stories, of course, being Atlantis, a probably originally fictional island civilization described by Plato in some of his dialogues that was, according to the story, a

punished for its hubris by being drowned in the ocean. And even though most experts on the original sources think this story probably did not refer to a place existing in reality, there are still people all the time who love to hunt for remains of Atlantis and similar drowned empires, or to interpret any strange underwater imagery or other phenomena or artifacts as evidence of such. Here's a weird-looking artifact from under the water. Maybe it's from Atlantis.

Yeah. And it's in many cases, it's harmless. But, you know, as we've been discussing, these kind of ideas can bleed into pseudoscience, pseudoarchaeology and whatever.

you know, and pseudo-geology. And some of these areas are perhaps harmless as well, but they can become increasingly less harmless depending on what form they end up taking within a given culture. I guess I would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been discussing with the idea of lost islands. And there's going to continue to be this kind of amorphous quality to it as we proceed.

Right. So despite the fact that hunting for a literal physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on, there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where land has relatively recently become covered in water. And the main real world example we talked about in the last episode was what has come to be known as Doggerland, a vast plain.

plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and north of the coastlines of continental Europe, off the north coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, occupying much of the area that is now filled in with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence that pointed to the existence of a past Dalgerland. So,

Such as observations going back centuries, actually, that sometimes low tide on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently ancient trees and trunks still rooted in their original soil, but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible?

as well as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human artifacts like the Kalinda harpoon, a Stone Age spear tip dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about 25 miles off the coast of Great Britain in the 1930s and 1931. So today we're back to talk more about the sunken lands, and I wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Doggerland in more depth.

So Doggerland used to be land. Now it's covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going to lay out a rough timeline here. And I just want to mention at the top here a couple of really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I was reading. One was called

Europe's Lost Frontier. This was a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry in January 2020. Another is called Mapping a Vanished Landscape. This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus in the March-April 2022 edition. So the Doggerland timeline goes like this. During the late Pleistocene, the last part of the most recent ice age, between about 125,000 and 12,000 years ago,

much of the world's water was locked in glaciers, and the North Sea was much lower than it is today. It was about 450 feet lower than the present average. So at this time, during the late Pleistocene, Doggerland was...

a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland steppe occupied mostly by megafauna like woolly mammoths or woolly rhinoceroses, but other large animals that can withstand cold environments like reindeer and the aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle. Then, after the conclusion of the Pleistocene,

we transition into the geological epoch known as the Holocene, which extends up until today. This is the warming period after the most recent ice age. So this period is characterized by a steady increase in temperatures, which caused glaciers to begin to melt. So for thousands of years, you know, think back roughly 10,000 years ago or so, for thousands of years,

Doggerland was still above sea level, but the warming climate and the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold, arid steppe—a tundra-like landscape—

into an increasingly lush land of forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes. And many sources describe this post-glacial landscape as a kind of hunter-gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter-gatherers? Well, there were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some indication that the ancient human relative Homo antecessor had existed in Doggerland going way back

During the Cold Arid Steppe period, the Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would have been a harsh existence. This would be a very cold and dry place where people would have survived by hunting large animals.

But Neanderthals did occupy the Doggerland Steppe. We know that through evidence of artifacts like axe heads and other flint artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected to a type of birch bark tar that the Neanderthals would use that they manufactured.

And then after the Neanderthals, during the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it was clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And the article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute ago quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden named Luke Amkreutz, who says, quote, During the Holocene,

Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer, wild boar, and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers. It was a Garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland.

So if you were a hunter-gatherer in Mesolithic Europe, especially after the glaciers began to melt and the climate began to warm, Doggerland was awesome. Jason Urbanis, writing this article, says that it is, quote, "...by any estimation, the most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and perhaps the continent's most densely populated region."

at the time. So sometimes when you think about a previously exposed piece of land that is, in many sources, referred to as, quote, a land bridge, because it is what bridged the mainland continental Europe with Great Britain, you think of a kind of transitional place, you know, that people just walked across. But no, it's not just a transitional place that allowed people to get from one highland to another. This was apparently the

about the best place you could be in this area of Europe at the time. It was full of resources. This is also amazing that he directly compares it to the Garden of Eden, that he compares it to not only a land of plenty, but a utopia, which lines up with so many of these ideas of a lost and or sunken land, of a land from which

people came but can no longer return to or may one day return to. But in this case, it does seem to line up with the idea of it actually being a land of plenty, actually being a place where resources were abundant.

But much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever. Though in this case, it apparently has nothing to do with the snake. It has to do with, in fact, the exact same forces that made it a land of plenty and abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it. So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed Augerland from an arid tundra into a lush paradise. And then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone Age graveyard it is today.

Oh, wow.

And then adding to the steady creep up of the waterline, there was a sudden cataclysmic event that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in the remaining coastal areas of that region towards the end of that warming period. So more than 8000 years ago, around 6200 BCE,

Again, at this point, much of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was left above the waterline was hit with a catastrophic tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway. It was actually one of a series of these underwater landslide events known as the Storega slides, S-T-O-R-E-G-G-A.

And I've seen different estimates for the exact height and power of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in Science by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least 10 meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland. But a 2021 study of its effects on the eastern coast of Scotland, so this is looking at Scotland, analyzed soil deposits to estimate that the water might have come as far as 18 miles inland.

Wow. I mean, even just looking at the 10 meter height, that would be almost 33 feet high. Right. So if you are in range of this tsunami, a catastrophic event also may have had some effect in moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas of land. Right, right. That again, were already exposed due to the rising sea levels. Right.

And actually, one of the last pieces of land remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger Bank, from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as an island for a while. So Doggerland came to be known as Doggerland when the name was given to it by an archaeologist named Bryony Coles.

And it was named after the sandbank in the North Sea known as the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers. So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the sandbank. There's good catch there. And those doggers give their name to the area. And apparently that sandbank was once an island that was one of the last parts of it left. Yeah.

Now, there's an interesting contradiction, which is that we know that it was probably one of the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe. It was full of abundant resources. There were lots of humans living there in the Middle Stone Age.

But it's hard to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just go dig. It's underwater. And also the water is deep and cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult place to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists...

learn things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the occasional artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net, like we talked about with the Kalinda harpoon. Well, actually, this is one of the main subjects of that article in Archaeology Magazine, Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Urbanus. And it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have come up with

or come across by accident to study Doggerland and see what we can learn about it. So one effort described in this article is associated with a University of Bradford archaeologist named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney is quoted extensively as,

in this article. And he talks about how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflection surveys originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you have a ship, it goes out in the water, it emits sound waves into the water, which bounce off of the seafloor and then are picked up by ship-based detectors.

And the physical features of the seafloor affect how the sound is altered when it bounces back. And then this information can be used to map shapes and contours and anomalies deep under the water. Now, they figured out that that same seismic data, which was, again, proprietary, it was owned by these energy companies, was used to map shapes and contours and anomalies deep under the water.

how that could be used by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what Doggerland was like before it flooded to study the hidden landscape. And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from, I think, multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum Geo Services or PGS.

And they talk about how they use data from this company to map a patch of sea roughly 2,300 square miles in size. And when they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at a place where a large river had once cut through what is now the submerged Dogger Bank. So imagine that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data, and then you realize it's showing you a map of what the

the land looked like before the water covered it. And you can see the riverbed and all that. And at the time of this article, their maps had expanded to cover more than 17,000 square miles. So they know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland than we did in the past. They have maps depicting a lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills, and valleys.

So that's one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project. But there's another interesting thing that's mentioned in both of these articles, which is that, of course, many more Mesolithic artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Kalinda Harpoon. There are lots of them now, especially a lot of these spear tips and sharp points. And a

And a lot of them have been found as an accidental byproduct of beach fill efforts that are used to help in one sense to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So basically, you have these big boats that go out and dredge up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom miles offshore and

And then they come back and they dump it at the water's edge to expand the existing land footprint, maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something, or to fix an eroding coastline, or to build up a sand barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater. And it just so happens that when they do this, when these boats dredge up

the seafloor for beachville they often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of doggerland on the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors and these articles describe archaeologists who are like in contact with these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're just getting artifacts from doggerland all the time now people are are

writing them to say, oh, here, I've got arrowheads, axes, barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like the Kalinda harpoon. Remember, that was made from the antler of a red deer.

And there's a lot we can learn from this stuff because the low oxygen soil deposits at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve organic materials very well. So the researchers have been able to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains, including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods.

And this includes DNA analysis. So we know a lot more than we used to. The downside, of course, is that if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where they're dredged from the ocean floor and then spit out on a beach somewhere, you know nothing about the context, really. I mean, you might have some rough ideas about where it comes from, but you know, you

Archaeologists want not just an artifact, but they want to understand the context of the artifact. What soil did it come from? Where exactly was that located? What was the situation in which this artifact would have originally been deposited?

So we're kind of like robbing future archaeologists who might have clearer maps and therefore a little better idea about where to search for such artifacts in these sunken lands. And also better means of actually investigating these sites and exploring them in a way that retains some level of context about the remains.

That's right. And so the archaeologists described in these articles have actually, in some cases, been able to identify artifacts in their original context. So one question it asks is, okay, so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable location during this warming period for the few thousand years that it was warming and wet, but not yet submerged. So when...

When people lived there, where did they live? Finding the location of settlements is obviously difficult underwater. But they say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic. But if there was a sheet with, you know, if there was a great abundance of resources, they might create semi-permanent settlements.

And the places you would look for those semi-permanent settlements might be things might be on like high ground close to wetland areas. So the wetlands would have resources that you would want, but you would want a like an elevated area above that. Now I'm going to read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology Magazine describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to.

identify an underwater site with the help of this mapping and then extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand more about the original context one of these sites quote was a shallow 15 mile long seafloor ridge known as brown bank where a wealth of archaeological objects including a 13 000 year old engraved oryx bone had been snared by fishing trawlers in the past the

The other was an area along a now-submerged river channel and estuary off the Norfolk coast known as the Southern River. Although the weather did not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short, they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a stone tool known as a hammer stone. So I was pretty amazed by that, the idea that they could...

Use these maps to find sites at the bottom of the North Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because of the value of those sites compared to the natural resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from under the water and actually find human artifacts where they expected to look for them.

That is impressive. And so the article goes on to say that while this individual find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the fact that this technique generally works for or generally could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland. ♪

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Of course we did. We had a blast in our nation's capital, staying at this Airbnb in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It made everything about this trip so much more relaxed. Plus, it helped us save money, which you know I love. We had a full kitchen. We cooked breakfast together every morning before heading out to see the sights.

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Now, another archaeological note that I wanted to mention, this is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from January 2020. And just as a funny side note, the dateline on this report is from a place in the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster.

which is near a beach that had been constructed via the sand motor process that I was talking about. So a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be found on the beach there and are found by people walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a lot of the same ground as the other one I was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is,

Okay, we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available from Doggerland. Does it reveal anything about what ancient people did in response to these steadily rising sea levels?

And there actually has been some research on this. They, of course, know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland with marshes and estuaries in the lower-lying areas and then scattered highlands, which stayed drier.

And analysis of human bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparently shifted their diet from land-based animals to freshwater fish. Yeah.

And then one last little fact I wanted to mention that I came across. This was in an article by Ioannis Decker et al. published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in 2021 called Human and Servid Osseous Materials Used for Barbed Point Manufacture in Mesolithic Doggerland. The fact was sort of contained in the title there.

We have already talked about how a lot of these sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people who lived here were made of antler and bone. These are primarily animal bones, of course, you know, so they might be using parts of a deer carcass or something like that to make a lot of these weapons. But apparently the authors of this study report at least two barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made out of human bone. Yeah.

That's fascinating. It makes one wonder, you know, what could have been the context for that? Was it a matter of some sort of a supply shortage with deer or elk bones? Was it maybe something that was ritualistic? Was it a way to honor ancestors? Or was it just, hey, we need more bone and we have some human bones on hand? Were these enemies? Were these friends?

So many questions. Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail like that. You think like, is this a question of efficiency or a question of choice? Yeah.

Well, this whole discussion of Doggerland has been fascinating. I really wasn't familiar with this topic at all. Yeah, I was not really either. I mean, reading about Doggerland, including some of the articles I've talked about today, is sort of what made me want to discuss it in the context of this broader subject of submerged lands. And, of course, it is not the only one. That's right. I want to come back to the topic of lost islands that we touched on briefly in the last episode.

I was reading about the topic in a book titled Lost Islands, the story of islands that have vanished from nautical charts by Henry Stomel. Um, this, this is a really, really fun book. He spends a lot of time just talking about like why, why people are just so fascinated with islands in general. It talks about like just the idea of an island is attractive to us. You know, it's kind of like this, this miniature world that we can comprehend in our head and,

And so therefore, real and definitely real islands, existing islands are of great interest to us. And the idea of lost islands as well. This is only half formed, but I feel like we are attracted to stories that are set in a location with clear boundaries, right?

Like we like stories that are set in a particular house. You know, there's like a haunted mansion and we just know the stories about that mansion. It's there. And the island is kind of the same way. You know, it's like it's got a clear boundary. It's surrounded by water. So we have an idea of the setting that is fully contained. Yeah.

Yeah. And they often do. You know, we've talked about the island ecosystems before. You know, you'll often encounter a situation where an island feels like a continent made small. You know, you'll have that diversity. You'll have the dry, arid lands. You'll have the rainforest, even snow-tipped mountains in some cases. And you'll have it all in just such a tight and contained space, relatively speaking.

Now, the author of this book, Stomel, points out that 19th century nautical charts feature a good 200 islands that we know now just don't exist.

And he writes that most of these were situations of poor location determination and or reporting errors. So in one example, 19th century cartographers ended up including Ganges Island in the Pacific, apparently as a concession to various reports of a reef or an island at its sighted coordinates. So, you know, you'd imagine a situation where the mapmakers are like, OK, well, some people are saying there's something there. Some people are not. Let's just go ahead and include it.

You know, maybe it's a situation where it's just safer to say, OK, we'll put it on there. But by 1933, it was clear that there was nothing there. That raises an interesting question. If you have ambiguous evidence, let's say your evidence, you think it's like 50-50 that an island is in a place or not, and you're a mapmaker. Should you err on the side of putting it there or not putting it there? Yeah. Like which would do which would do the least harm if you were wrong? Yeah, yeah. I think it's a fair consideration.

He also points out that other matters were situations of fraud or deception may come back to that idea in the next episode. He also mentions optical illusions, as we've noted already and we discussed in our Fata Morgana episodes in the past. But he also stresses, quote, that some volcanic islands do pop up and down. And this is what I want to dive into for the remainder of this episode.

He mentioned specifically the alleged islands of Los Tuanahi or Tuanaki near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific area.

This is one of several sites noted in the book Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick Nunn. His website, by the way, is Patrick Nunn. That's N-U-N-N dot org. Really good website with links to all his books. He's a scientist and author of multiple books dealing with sunken lands and seems to be one of the leading living authorities on this subject. Hmm.

In Vanished Islands, Nunn lists 21 Pacific islands that he classifies as, quote, satisfactorily authenticated or partially authenticated islands, and then in parentheses, probably real islands, while also identifying a longer list of islands that are likely mythical. Mm-hmm.

And I have to say, I really wasn't expecting there to be so many, to be, you know, there to be a list of 21 Pacific Islands that are, you know, retained at least within oral traditions of the peoples who have lived in this area that have just vanished, that were real at one point and are now gone. But of course, as we'll discuss, it is a geologically active area. Yeah.

Okay, so what would be some examples here? Well, he brings up the traditions of the people of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. And apparently there are multiple oral traditions of often catastrophic land sinkings. So really, ultimately, exactly the sort of catastrophic island sinks into the ocean sort of events that may pop into your head and that you might think, well, this is more like the kind of thing that occurs just in fictions and fantasy and so forth.

But Nunn stresses that these have likely occurred throughout human history in these given areas, throughout the history of human occupation of these areas, with fresh incidents, fresh thinkings, fresh events, rejuvenating older traditions and older ideas, as well as myths concerning lost islands that align with our previously discussed tropes of utopias and golden ages. Nunn writes,

Quote, many such stories have been believed in literally so that at various times, oftentimes of famine, people have searched of these fabled islands of plenty, but only one canoe has ever was ever heard from again. So, you know, you have these sorts of stories where there was this place that we came from, this place that was known and it was rich and it was abundant. And during times of famine, it might be a place that people seek for again, but cannot find.

So what you would get is the story of the failed attempt to rediscover the lost land. Yeah, yeah. So it would seem. And so this is, again, getting into that area where myth and reality kind of feed into each other. And it gets very complex. There are so many ways to look at any given belief system.

But to be clear, there are numerous examples, according to Nunn, of populated islands in this region that sank beneath the waves. One example is Tian'emanu, previously located in a very seismically active part of the Solomon Islands. In its current reduced state, it's known as Lark Shoal.

And apparently the sinking of Tinamanu was really rapid, with only a few individuals escaping via canoe, but enough escaped to pass on their accounts into the oral tradition. And this is interesting because some of the details line up with what we were just talking about with Doggerland. But Nunn says that the island was apparently affected by a large seafloor earthquake that

that destabilized the underwater ridge that the island was situated on, causing it to slide into deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land. Oh, okay. So this was not just continually increasing sea levels. This was a rapid, sudden seismic event that caused a sudden end to the land. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is a real cataclysm. This is kind of ironically the sort of thing that the imagination may summon when you bring up the idea of Atlantis sinking into the ocean. But I do have to point out that he stresses that nothing you could describe as a sunken continent exists in the Pacific Ocean. The various lost islands he references are not at all on the scale of pseudoscientific lands like Mu and Lemuria.

Right. So you really can't interpret any of the real world examples as giving credence to any of these stories of lost civilizations like Atlantis or Lemuria or whatever, just because like the details don't line up at all. Right.

So Nunn explores various islands at length in a couple of the books that I looked at. But one I found really interesting, it kind of lines up with a lot of what we're talking about in these episodes, and it's the land of Hawaki. So in various Polynesian mythologies and under some different specific names, this is the homeland from which the people departed to populate the islands of the Pacific.

It takes on the character of not only a place of origin, but especially with the Maori, a spiritual underworld and or a land beneath the sea, a place where the gods reside and or where souls return to.

And Nunn points out that Hawaki is generally positioned in the West in these various traditions, which he says certainly matches up with accepted migration patterns of humans, you know, the last wave of true human exploration on our planet.

But he also says that as far as mythology is concerned, it also could be more aligned with ideas concerning death in the setting of the sun. So just a reminder that there are so many factors to consider in any given belief system. And you ultimately can't latch on to just like one belief.

Right.

But we should be careful about saying that it was an island that sank beneath the waves in this case. Noone writes that while some pseudoscience writers have kind of picked this up and run with it, linking it to concepts like Lemuria, like Mu, the idea that Hawaki sank is not a widespread detail in actual Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.

Oh, that's interesting. So maybe people reporting the stories told by other cultures, but with their own gloss and a sort of background of Atlantis knowledge and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And I guess you could also approach like you could also be reading about these other islands that that did sink that are lost. And, you know, you end up looking at that evidence and then you take into account this tradition as well. Yeah.

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Of course we did. We had a blast in our nation's capital, staying at this Airbnb in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It made everything about this trip so much more relaxed. Plus, it helped us save money, which you know I love. We had a full kitchen. We cooked breakfast together every morning before heading out to see the sights.

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This is Jonathan Strickland from Tech Stuff. I've been getting into the holiday spirit by listening to a lot, and I mean...

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So Nunn's work is really interesting. He's been one of many voices stressing the threat that climate change and rising sea levels pose to islands in the West Pacific, where sea levels have risen at two or three times the global average over the past few decades, thus endangering not only the livelihoods and culture of modern inhabitants, but endangering their histories as well. Mm-hmm.

Pacific Island reefs, which only formed in the last 4,000 years, according to Nunn, are particularly vulnerable to erosion via rising sea levels. He stressed this in a 2017 article for The Conversation. Now, I may come back to more of Nunn's work in the next episode. Again, there's so much of it. If you're fascinated by this topic, I definitely recommend checking out his work. But

He also points to some other natural phenomena that have led to past mistakes in erroneous island identification. So these errors and saying, I think there's an island here, and then it turns out there's nothing there.

Okay, so the picture I'm getting, correct me if this is wrong, is there are a lot of stories of vanished islands. There are a few cases where it seems like, yes, this really did happen, but the majority of cases seem to be a mistake or a legend of some kind, and there are a lot of different explanations. Correct. Explanations for the mistakes. So, yeah, what would those be? Well, one of them that he brings up is, of course, floating vegetation. We've discussed this before. You know, things like...

like the Sargassum weed and so forth. You have some sort of a big mat of vegetation out there. And especially if you're unfamiliar with the area, if you've never encountered this before and you're looking at it from a distance, you might think, oh, well, there's some sort of land out there. I'm not saying you'll mistake it for like a huge, robust island, but you might mistake it for something worth marking on a nautical map.

The other one, the other possibility that I was not prepared for that he mentions in passing is that it could be that what you're gazing out there is not a reef, is not something poking out of the water or even like a large expanse of some sort of landmass. It could just be the white scum of the Pololo Wern. I've never even heard of this. What is this?

So these are marine annelid worms of the Pacific Islands that engage in mass spawning. And it's a weird one. So these creatures live in the seafloor substrate.

And they look like, when we say worms, I mean, they're not like earthworms. They have various appendages. They have these kind of like tentacly things on their heads. They're, you know, they're not, I wouldn't say they're grotesque or anything. They're kind of beautiful in their own way. To me, they kind of look like a cross between an earthworm and a centipede. Yeah, yeah. Imagine something like that living in the seafloor substrate.

So they live down there. They live in their holes and so forth. But as breeding season approaches, they begin to change. So first, the tail of the worm undergoes a great deal of alteration. Muscles and organs degenerate. The appendages down there become more paddle-like. And the reproductive organs grow. They swell in size and end up taking up more of the real estate in that back half of the organism. Mm-hmm.

And then in line with the phases of the moon, all of the pololo worms stick their back halves out of their holes and then they rupture. They break into the tail section full of reproductive cells. And again, augmented now for swimming, it's broken off and it swims up to the surface.

while the rest of the worm stays down in the seafloor muck and regenerates. So the part that stays down there and regenerates is the atoch, and then the epitopes are the bits that go swimming up to the surface.

OK, so they're going up to the surface, taking sex cells with them? Yes. Yeah. They go up to the surface. And again, all at once. We're talking in the tens of thousands. This is a mass spawning event. And then they just ride around and release their gametes. So it's it's it's it sounds like a sight to behold.

Now, as with a lot of mass spawning incidents in the ocean, this, of course, attracts the attention of a lot of predators. If you're some sort of a predatory fish in the vicinity and this is occurring, well, you've got more than an easy meal on your hands. You've got to go there and get a bite. And this applies to human beings as well. Palolo worms and their relatives are considered quite a delicacy in various cultures. I love this.

Now, I was obviously I was looking around for a little more insight on this. I wanted to know, like, what what are they cooking with these? So what are they preparing? And I did find an article on Gastro Obscura by Sam O'Brien pointing out that, yeah, in especially in Samoan traditions, the pololos are often fried up with eggs. It's they're baked into bread with coconut milk and onions or they're kind of like sprinkled or spread on toast bread.

The author here, she describes it as a seaweed or caviar flavor, but with a noodle texture. And I've seen it elsewhere described as, quote, the caviar of the Pacific. Ooh, yeah. So savory, seafood-y kind of taste. That sounds wonderful, actually. I want to try it.

Yeah, I included a photo here for you, Joe, and I recommend everyone look up that article or just look up pictures in general. And the picture I have here for you, Joe, is I believe it's a piece of toast with this pololo spread on top. And it looks nice, reminiscent of like a creamed spinach, I guess, just based on appearances. But again, the taste profile is apparently more like caviar meets noodles.

I don't know if it's just the lighting in this picture. It almost looks kind of blue. It's like a blue, yeah, wilted green kind of appearance spread across a piece of toast. Yeah. And I believe it's also a delicacy, a related organism as a delicacy in Japan. So if we have any listeners out there who've tried...

tried these dishes or related dishes, please write in and share. We'd love to hear your take on it. Well, I did not expect things to go in this direction. I am mighty intrigued. I do want to try this food. But wait a minute. We've got to convict. How could this be mistaken for an island? Okay. So after the breeding is finished, after the predators have had their fill, after humans have come and harvested their share of the spoils, the

The rest of it, again, the breeding is carried out, but apparently the rest of it then just kind of rots and disintegrates on the surface of the water into this white, oily scum. I found multiple, especially older, like Western descriptions, clearly describing it as a scum, an oily scum. And apparently this is...

this is what we could then potentially mistake for an island. I'm guessing especially by individuals who are not familiar with the organisms because, you know, obviously,

There would be locals who would know about this because they know what is left behind after they've gone out and harvested their share of the pololo worms. But if you didn't know what you're looking at, you might see like a big sort of gleaming oily white mass, and you might think that it is some sort of a landmass.

Well, so this reminds me of something we've actually talked about on the show before, which is pumice rafting phenomenon. Sometimes after a volcanic eruption on one of these islands, there will be a great outflow of pumice, low density rocks that actually rocks that float on the surface of the water and all kind of clump together. And if you look up pictures of this, it looks extremely weird. It's like a parking lot floating in the middle of the ocean. Right.

So all of these floating phenomena, yeah, you can have floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that, you know, you should mark as an island on a map. You, I guess, could imagine a pumice raft, though that's a fairly transient phenomenon related to these volcanic eruptions. Yeah.

And now we've got to add Wormsex to the list. Wormsex Island. Wormsex Island. Yeah, something that, again, would be it would it would it would occur every year, but it wouldn't always be out there. And it seems entirely likely that that foreigners to the to these seas might encounter it and make note of it. And you could end up with an erroneous island identification.

So, yeah, I was not expecting to talk about worm reproduction in this episode, but that's where the research took us. Amazing. But, hey, we are not done, are we? We've got to talk about more sunken lands. So we will be back next time to explore this topic further.

That's right. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do Lister Mails on Mondays. On Wednesdays, we tend to do a short-form artifact or monster fact episode. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns.

to watch a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. If you are on social media, follow our accounts because they're active once more. If you use Instagram, look us up. Specifically, STBYM Podcast is our handle. There's an old one that has sunken beneath the waves of social media, but STBYM Podcast is the active one. And I think there's some pretty fun stuff going up there. So it's one way to keep up with us. Phew.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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