From the Vault: The Sunken Lands, Part 3
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Hello and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick. Today we're bringing you an older episode of the show, an episode from The Vault. This is part three of the series that we started running last Saturday. This is called The Sunken Lands. This episode in particular aired originally on December 5th, 2023. Enjoy. The Sunken Lands

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 three in our series called The Sunken Lands, about places on Earth that were relatively recently solid land but are now covered by the waters.

In the previous two parts of this series, we discussed myths, legends, and obsolete theories of sunken lands, including the most popular drowned civilization, Atlantis, an advanced island state discussed in the writings of Plato, which the majority of experts on the original sources seem to think is best interpreted as a fictional setting used to illustrate a point in Plato's writings.

rather than a reference to a real place that actually existed. But of course, that does not stop the many Atlantis hunters of the Internet. Right. And it doesn't stop the human imagination, which has gone wild with the concept, as we discussed, in many responsible ways and occasionally irresponsible ways as well. Right. So we also talked about the very real sunken landmass now known as Doggerland, which was a vast plain connecting Great Britain

to mainland Europe during and for several thousand years following the last ice age. Doggerland is a fascinating mystery that archaeologists and other scientists are learning more about all the time. But one of the most intriguing things that we've learned is that this drowned world was not only inhabited by humans for the few thousand years after it began warming at the beginning of the Holocene,

It was something many experts have described it as something of a paradise, rich with resources and possibly one of the most densely populated places in Middle Stone Age Europe. But of course, it was eventually smothered underneath rising seas and also battered by a colossal tsunami from an underwater landslide around 6200 BCE.

After that, we talked about cases of alleged vanishing islands in the Pacific, including reasons for thinking that some of these accounts are genuine. One example that you brought up, Rob, is the island of Teonimanu, a former island described in the oral traditions of some of the Solomon Islanders, which allegedly sank beneath the waves in a rapid seismic event. So this happened suddenly and some people barely escaped in canoes.

And according to the sources we were looking at last time, it is thought that this probably did actually happen. Yeah, yeah, that seems to be the consensus. Though there are, of course, many other examples of alleged vanishing islands being more likely just cases of mistaken identification in the first instance, probably. We discussed reasons for possibly mistaking something for an island, perhaps.

maybe visual illusions like Fata Morgana or being mistaken about where you are when you see an actual island or mistaking patches of things floating in the water for land. One example we talked about was seaweed. Another was volcanic pumice rafts. And then everybody's favorite, the possibility that somebody could mistake white oily scum left over after seasonal worm sex as some indication of a landmass. It's absolutely in the mix.

Now, I wanted to talk about another example of a quite real sunken land that we have tons of evidence for. Many people were probably thinking about it when we were talking about Doggerland, because this is perhaps, at least to North Americans, the even more famous sunken land bridge between two continental masses, and that would be the submerged plains of Beringia.

This refers to an area of the globe between northwestern North America, including Alaska and northwest Canada on one side, and northeastern Russia on the other. And it is now thought that during the late Pleistocene,

So the last ice age, huge expanses of what are now the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, and the Chukchi Sea were lands exposed by dropping sea levels. So

The geological story of Beringia has some things in common with the story of Doggerland, which we talked about previously. The lower sea levels of the Pleistocene were associated with massive glacier formation during the last glacial maximum.

Roughly 20,000 years ago, about 25% of the Earth's land surface and about 8% of its total surface was covered in ice. And global sea level was like 400 feet lower than it is today. It's hard to imagine the amount of ice unless maybe you have been to Antarctica or something.

Yeah.

which at its greatest extent was more than 13 million square kilometers, and at its thickest, probably near the middle, may have been up to 3,000 meters tall, which is almost two miles high of ice.

So it's kind of hard to imagine again. And during this time of lower sea levels, it has long been thought that the much of the exposed land of Beringia probably was some kind of steppe tundra environment, a sort of cold, arid grassland.

But at the end of the Pleistocene, roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the Earth began to warm, ice melted, and sea levels rose. And these were the trends, of course, that eventually covered Doggerland in water. And the same happened to the exposed lands of Beringia.

Now, there is no land bridge connecting North America to Asia, but at the time there was, it served as an important corridor of exchange between the continents, with evidence showing that plants, animals, and people spread through and across it. Now, a lot of people probably know that the Beringia Land Bridge is

plays a role in several of the current competing major theories of how people came to occupy the Americas, though there are, of course, competing explanations even within that space. For example, the question of whether the first people to come to North America traveled by land and found a way south through an ice-free inland corridor, and if they did that at what time.

or whether those people migrated along the coastline of Beringia, mostly traveling by boat, surviving along the way with the help of kelp forests and other coastal resources. So there are still lots of open questions in that debate. But we know this was the corridor for the exchange of many different species. And we've discussed some examples of this on the show before, ranging from, you know, of course, human beings to also things like species of camel.

And other things that I didn't even think about until I was reading for this episode, like the gray wolf, the exchange of the wolf. Yeah. Now, an interesting thing I was thinking about was a similarity with with Doggerland, as we mentioned with Doggerland.

The phrase land bridge can potentially be deceptive. On one hand, it does sort of accurately describe what happens when sea levels drop and a ground corridor is established between two land masses that used to be and or would later be separated by water.

On the other hand, the term bridge kind of creates the impression of a transitional space that one merely crosses to get from one side to the other. Like you don't build a house in the middle of a bridge. Well, I guess you might if it's one of those bridges without buildings on it in Italy or France or wherever. But but you know what I mean? Most of the time you don't set up camp in the middle of a bridge. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is this is this is a concept that always kind of comes to mind whenever I'm reading about land bridges is.

On some level, you're imagining it as a situation where like the wolves and the camels are like, hey, guys, there's a temporary passage between these two land masses. Let's all go get at it. And, you know, everybody rushes to get from one side to the other and then the land bridge goes away.

Right. So that can be kind of deceptive. In the case of Doggerland, we know that not only was the now flooded land inhabited by Neanderthals and later Mesolithic Homo sapiens, during its brief warm period for the few thousand years between the end of the Pleistocene and the time it was under the water, it was probably one of the most resource abundant places in Europe. And as I said earlier, it may have been one of the most densely populated as well.

So with that in mind, to what extent could we also think of Beringia more as a destination in itself, a place to be rather than just a way to get somewhere? Well, in fact, we know that it was a habitat environment for many terrestrial plants and animals. And so the real question is, to what extent this would be true for people as well?

So I came across one paper from 2014 raising a few lines of evidence for thinking that the large, now submerged plain in the middle of the Bering land bridge was actually a relatively habitable refuge for plants, animals, and people during the last glacial maximum and may have been home to an isolated population of Native American ancestors for thousands of years.

So the paper is called Out of Beringia? Published in the Journal Science in 2014 by Hoffaker, Elias, and O'Rourke. And one of the core pieces of evidence here is a sampling of mitochondrial DNA from more than 600 Native American people in the present, most of whom shared unique mitochondrial DNA mutations not shared by their closest relatives in Asia—

indicating that most likely they can trace their ancestry back to a group of people that was living isolated from people in the rest of Asia for thousands of years, perhaps 10,000 years or so before spreading across the continents of North and South America. And if this is in fact the case, where would this population of people be living? Perhaps in a region of Beringia that supported long-term settlement.

Now, you might think, but wait a minute, wasn't Beringia too cold and arid and free of resources? Not necessarily. Paleoecological evidence is showing that parts of central Beringia may have actually been more rich in plant and animal resources that would potentially support continued human habitation.

And this evidence includes things cited by these authors like sediment cores that you would take from the bottom of the Bering Sea. So you like core out an area of the sediment strata there and see what's in it. And it turns out these sediment samples contain remnants of pollen and other plant matter and insects that indicate that while outer regions of Beringia may have been more inhospitable and arid, very like dry, cold steppe lands,

The central lowlands of Beringia may very well have had plenty of animal populations for hunting and especially important woody plants, which could have been used as fuel for fires. And as we know, wood is a big deal there. There was not a whole lot of wood available in the Arctic at the time due to the extent of the glaciers there.

And fuel for fire can make the difference between a place being able to sustain human life or not.

So already we're painting an entirely different picture of a quote unquote land bridge than I think a lot of us might have had in our head. Right. So to quote lead author John Hoffaker, who is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, speaking to Live Science, he said, quote, the central part of Beringia was probably the mildest, most comfortable place to live at high latitudes during the last glacial maximum. It is the most logical place for a group of people to hunker down.

And the term used for this area is a glacial refugium, a place where organisms can survive despite hostile conditions in the surrounding areas. So this might have been a sort of warmer, milder, wetter area in the middle of very cold, dry or glaciated areas that would be able to survive.

to maintain all of this diversity of species like shrub trees that you could burn for wood and animals that could sustain human hunting and possibly people living there for thousands of years.

So the idea of many millennia of people living isolated in this refugium is sometimes referred to as the Beringian standstill hypothesis. And though it's not meant to, I feel like this is another one where the word choice brings some of the wrong connotations because standstill kind of like bridge it.

to me, at least it implies a connotation that like these people would have been trying to get somewhere and then they were stalled or delayed rather than this is simply where and how people were living their lives, just like anywhere else on earth. Yeah. Again, because you're talking about thousands of years here. You're not talking about, again, this brief opportunity to move from point A to point B. It isn't the emergence of a point C, at least. I feel like the historical perspective we have is,

often leads to misconceptions like this. Like when you look back through history, we know or simply have an idea, right or wrong, of what happened before and after a period of time.

And with that historical perspective, I think we often have a hard time understanding that people within that period probably did not think of themselves as transitional between two things, but were trying to live their lives like anyone else. And, you know, I was having the same pattern of thoughts about Doggerland. Like, we now know that it was really only this lush buffet of a world for a few thousand years in Doggerland.

But to the people living there, it was probably just home, right? Yeah. I mean, to your point, like this was to them, to them, this was the world, you know, not to discount the possibility that they had some oral traditions or so forth of the places they came from or the world before. But, you know, it skews, you know, hindsight is 20-20. And that certainly applies to our understanding of history.

I guess the other way of looking at it is that on a long enough time scale, all people living in all places at all times are living in transitional points. Yes.

Though that's interesting to think about because it kind of comes back to what we discussed in previous episodes about golden ages, lost golden ages, the thing that we're trying to reclaim or trying to find again, you know, that also kind of loses sight of the fact that life is continually a state of change and it's always in a state of transition. And

It reminds me, I forget what talk this was, but there was a talk that Terrence McKenna gave where he used the line, and if something needs to be done, you will find yourself doing it, which I think, I forget the exact context of it, but yeah.

You know, it kind of speaks to how human beings have survived and grown and expanded so much over the course of their existence. They have expanded into new areas. They have left areas. They have changed. They have rolled with the punches of transition. But at the same time, you know, created these stories and look back longingly at supposed better times, whether or not they were actually better.

That's a good point. But to come back to the Beringian standstill hypothesis, it is important to remember that this is just a hypothesis. Like, it would need more direct evidence in its favor, such as especially archaeological discoveries, which had not been found at the time this article was published. Right.

And I looked around and couldn't find any evidence of archaeological discoveries backing it up since then. And critics of this hypothesis argue that not only do we not have archaeological evidence, we probably should expect to have found some by now, since not all of this territory is underwater, though a lot of it is. But either way, so we don't know. This is an idea. It may or may not be correct. But if this idea is correct, we're going to have to look at it.

Once the surrounding glaciers began to melt, the idea is that the Beringian people probably expanded their territory and then moved on down the coastline and into the interior of the North American continent and spread on from there.

But the ultimate point about the land being that much like Doggerland, this is an area that was land when when the glaciers were at their peak, when when the water was locked in the ice. And so there were these vast stretches of plains that are now buried beneath the sea. And there's probably a lot more that we could know about them more easily if it were not underneath the sea. And we could, you know, just go around and do digs and look.

for paleontological remains, you know, animal remains, plant remains, and see if we could find human tools and remains of what people were doing in these places. But it's, again, more challenging because of the water covering things now. Yeah.

Well, that's fascinating. Again, that kind of essentially kind of turns over this loose idea that I had in my head of land bridges. So this might be an interesting general topic to come back to in the future. ♪

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Now, in all this talk of sunken lands and lost islands in particular that we got into in the last episode, I thought it might be fun to explore something that lines up with this concept in a unique way. And that is the topic of atolls or atolls. You apparently can say it both ways. And hey, I might just say it both ways as we proceed here.

So these are essentially coral reefs encircling a lagoon. They're not always circular, but there are some stunning examples of circular atolls. And you've probably seen pictures of these. There are numerous examples of them circulating.

Big Blue Hole in Belize is one that is commonly mentioned and commonly photographed. But it's like, yeah, you have this circular reef, reef islands, and then in the middle, more water. So it looks like, you know, this looks like something is missing. Right. And this has certainly invited curiosity over over the many years here, as long as people have been encountering them, because it raises the question, how did they form here?

This was actually a question that none other than Charles Darwin considered on the voyage of the HMS Beagle during the 1830s. So when I was reading about that, I had to pull open his book, The Voyage of the Beagle. And he gets into this at one point and he writes about some of the theories of the day that he was less convinced by.

So the first idea he brings up is that, quote, coral building animals instinctively built up their great circles to afford themselves protection in the inner parts. So that would seem to imply that, yeah, you have.

Coral is like growing up from the seabed and building a great ring so that they can have like a protected area in the middle. And on this theory, he points out that, OK, coral don't thrive within the Etal Lagoon. And this would be a case in which, quote, many species of distinct genera and families are supposed to combine for one end. And of such a combination, not a single instance can be found in the whole of nature.

Okay, so the creatures forming the reef would have to be all working together to protect this inner area. But also he points out like you don't really see the coral doing much in the inner area. It's not like they're, oh, that's the place where they keep all their soft parts. They're just not really in there.

Yeah. And then additionally, where else in the natural world do we see this kind of like cross-genera cooperation going on? I mean, I guess you could, you know, there's some little instances here and there where you talk about, you know, prey animal communication and alerting, you know, generally to the idea of predators in their midst. But something on the scale of this, he argues, we don't really see. Okay.

The next theory he mentions is that atolls are based on submarine craters. And he points out that this doesn't hold up when you look at all the examples in the world that were known at the time. It just simply doesn't account for everything.

Another idea that he explores is the idea that coral edges were exposed to the outer sea and along these edges grew up more quickly. But as with theory one, the question remains, what did they grow on? He stresses that reef building corals cannot live at great depth.

And therefore, like what would grow up then to be it doesn't make sense that they would they would start deep down and then grow up because we know that these corals that live near the surface don't thrive in the deep water. Right. So it's only in the the shallow living corals only live in these areas that are already shallow for some reason. Like it's like it's almost an island. Right. Right. And it is worth noting that there are deep water corals and they they do produce deep sea reefs, but it's structurally different apparently.

So he writes at fair length about all of this and about what he thinks is happening. And here's a section that more or less encapsulates it. Quote,

As the barrier reef slowly sinks down, the corals will go on vigorously growing upwards. But as the island sinks, this would be the island around which the reef is formed, he continues, the water will gain inch by inch on the shore, the separate mountains first forming separate islands within one great reef, and finally the last and highest pinnacle disappearing.

The instant this takes place, a perfect atoll is formed. I have said, remove the high land from within an encircling barrier reef, and an atoll is left, and the land has been removed. We can now perceive how it comes that atolls, having sprung from encircling barrier reefs, resemble them in general size, form, in the manner in which they are coupled together, and in their arrangement in single or double lines, for they may be called rude outline charts of the sunken islands over which they stand.

Okay. So the idea, there would be a volcanic island that forms, it gradually begins to sink, but as it is sinking, the barrier reef is built up to encircle it in the shallow water around it. And that height comes up as the central island just continues to go down. So an atoll, to come back to the idea of sort of transitional landforms, is somewhere in between a volcanic island and

an eventually fully sunken island. Right. And in this case, the volcanic island is no longer active and is falling away. Meanwhile, the coral is alive and is building up.

That makes sense. Was he right? Well, it's interesting. So this is generally referred to as the subsistence model. And it does it. It seems like it's very much in the mix today. You certainly see it cited all over the place and it pops up in textbooks and so forth.

But not everyone loves it. And there are some very vocal experts who say this really doesn't explain everything. And we ultimately need to look maybe more at another theory or ultimately look at sort of a host of theories. And maybe we should get away from the idea that one theory in general is going to explain every formation like this that we find in the world's oceans.

There's another key formation theory called the antecedent karst model. And this one proposes that dropping sea levels, this has to do with like cyclical changes in sea level over time. It proposes that dropping sea levels expose the top of a flat topped bank of carbonate rocks.

And then while this is exposed, again, for life with our land bridge model, not for just a couple of days, but for an extended period of time, rainwater steadily pools in the flat-topped bank and dissolves some of the carbonate.

forming a depression. Eventually, sea levels rise again, and fresh coral builds up atop this raised circular edge. Again, roughly speaking, it doesn't have to be anything remotely resembling a perfect circle. But then the coral builds up on this raised circular edge of the depression. This forms the atoll, according to this theory. So again, it has a lot to do with cyclical changes in sea level. Oh, okay. So much...

Kind of like how a cave is formed in limestone by like rainwater coming down or, you know, water, water rushing through and dissolving some of the sedimentary rock and eventually forming a cave here. The idea would be that in the times of

When a seamount or island top is exposed by lowering sea levels, the rainwater comes down and sort of it dissolves it in kind of the same way that rainwater dissolves a cave cavity. And it lowers the central area of the island. But of course, the coral is still building up the reef all around that central raised area. Yeah, that's my understanding of this.

Alexander Witts wrote a great article about the antecedent Karst model back in 2021 for Noble magazine. It was then reprinted on Smithsonian where you can also find it.

So I was reading about that here, and the author makes several key points that I wanted to draw out for this discussion. First of all, the author writes that experts that generally agree that Darwin got it wrong with his theory, they also admit that he crafted a very insightful theory for the day, given the limited amount of data. Mm-hmm.

Also, some reefs may have still formed via the method that Darwin is describing here, such as some atolls found in Tahiti. And in any case, they often stress that we shouldn't look maybe for one unifying theory for atoll formation because there may ultimately be a handful of explanations in the mix, including things like tectonic forces and wave action.

Ah, that's a good point. Yeah, there could be multiple mechanisms creating similar-looking formations. Yeah. The author also points out that understanding the varying reasons in play also helps us to understand which atolls are most at risk from climate change and rising sea levels. The author writes, quote, "...in the absence of humans, atolls can grow at a rate much faster than that of sea-level rise, but people have degraded natural atolls by introducing pollution and waste."

altering the water table and adding concrete and asphalt that smothers the underlying coral. The Maldives and the Indian Ocean face a future of flooding, water contamination and erosion that threaten its tourism and fishery industries. The Maldives, by the way, according to the article, may have formed more due to the action of waves, wave-based erosion, than by the carcification theory that I was talking about earlier, at least according to one study.

But to come back to just the topic of sunken lands and sunken islands in general, yeah, I think atolls fit into the concept, though.

though the added discussion and or disagreement concerns exactly how central exposed land masses may have formed and or fallen away, and to what extent it involves things essentially rising from the ocean or then sinking back below the depths. Because both Darwin and the carcinification theories entail a central exposed land mass or island around which the coral builds.

I mean, part of me would wonder if you could just to some extent tell the difference between these by looking at the kind of rock. Because in Darwin's theory, for example, if the idea is that the island is volcanic in origin, wouldn't you be mainly looking at volcanic rock left over in the middle? Whereas if it's a karst process, you would be looking at sedimentary rock in the middle. Am I wrong about that?

The article I cited does go into more detail about this. And, yeah, it's my understanding that a lot of what we know now, it does hinge upon geologic evidence that Darwin wasn't exposed to and did not have back in the day. And so we do know a lot more about what sorts of rocks are underlying any given landmass that we're discussing.

So I guess if the karstification explanation has come more into favor, that would suggest that more often the coral atoll is found around a limestone formation rather than a volcanic rock formation. That would seem to be the case. But again, based on what I was reading, it sounds like

Like it is maybe a suite of theories that we might turn to as opposed to, again, one unifying theory for all of these atolls. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian. Bartesian? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for $4.

So how about a Closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and... Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. ♪

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker, Bartesian. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

Thank you.

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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...

a lot of music on my Sonos Move 2 smart speaker. Now, the thing I love about the Move 2 is that I can pick it up off its cradle and just carry it with me room to room. So whether I'm decking the halls or I'm prepping hot apple cider or I'm just rocking out to my punk rock holiday music playlist in the living room, I can carry the tunes with me. But better

Other than that, Sonos has engineered their products to deliver the highest quality sound you could ask for. So bringing the Move 2 into a room is like transforming that space into the perfect listening environment. Doesn't matter which room it is. And I can go hours without needing to put it back on the cradle to recharge it. Sonos has great gifts for everyone on your list. Visit Sonos.com forward slash tech stuff to wrap up your holiday shopping. That's Sonos.com slash tech stuff.

Now, as we touched on during the first episode, I wanted to come back around to this because water levels don't only rise due to geologic events and storms and global warming. It also occurs when humans build dams to form artificial lakes. Well, I mean, I guess you could maybe make an argument for beavers as well, but especially humans. That's true. Humans can pour concrete.

But, you know, this allows humans to otherwise manipulate rivers and lakes. And it's worth stressing that in addition to hydroelectricity, and you'll know this if you've ever visited a dam and gone through like, you know, the educational portion of the dam, in addition to producing electricity, another major reason for dams is to often to tame rivers that periodically endanger neighboring and low-lying areas. But in doing so, in creating lakes,

We, of course, sometimes sink formerly inhabited lands, both ancient and modern. And, of course, this has taken place all over the world. There are so many examples that we could turn to, but I thought I might highlight some examples that stood out to me. And, of course, if any others come up, we may bring them up later and certainly feel free to write in about examples that come to your mind.

But one that is often mentioned is, of course, the site of Abu Simbel in Egypt. This was an ancient rock-cut temple complex near the current Egyptian-Sudanese border, and it dates back to the 13th century BCE.

This site was threatened by Lake Nasser. This is the Aswan Dam Reservoir during the 20th century. But in 1968, it was actually relocated to another site. So a massive relocation effort to move everything to a higher elevation further away from the water. Another famous dam, of course, is the Three Gorges Dam in China that also entailed a great deal of relocation from the area to be flooded. You know,

in terms of like the lake that's going to build up, but also the river itself. And this also included something called White Crane Ridge. It's an archaeological site. The inscriptions here date back to the Tang Dynasty and provide detailed water level records on the Yangtze River. Some, I think, 1,200 years worth of data based on what I was reading.

Some of the carvings were relocated, but others remain in a special underwater museum constructed prior to the flooding. So you apparently, this is underneath the river, so you apparently take an escalator down from a facility by the riverbank through some tunnels to reach the museum. Whoa.

Another example from China that I ran across is Lion City or Xieqing in eastern China. It's an example of an eastern Han Dynasty city that is now under the waters of a man-made lake. This is Thousand Island Lake.

This was flooded in the mid-20th century as well when most of these projects were taking place around the world. And it has apparently become a tourism destination, at least for very experienced divers. I read that it's not really the kind of thing that casual divers are going down for, but experienced divers have sought this out. And you can find some images online of various sort of, you know, haunting underwater remnants of this place.

As a creature of East Tennessee, I grew up with a lot of consciousness of the idea of lands flooded by the creation of dams, specifically with TVA Hydroelectric. Yeah, the Tennessee Valley Authority, right? Yeah. Things like Kentucky Lake.

Um, you know, there are always a lot of, you know, these, anytime you have a big lake like this, there's going to be some sort of a relocation effort that has to take place. And I feel like inevitably you're going to have some things left behind beneath the water. And on top of what's actually underneath the water, you're going to have stories about what may be underneath the water, uh, you know, tales of, uh, lost towns and so forth. I think I used to have dreams when I was little of finding houses submerged underneath the lake. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And this sort of thing has been explored in media. It pops up in the Coen Brothers, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and so forth. And I think ultimately, wherever you're listening to this show, you probably don't have to go too far to find an example of some sort of an artificial lake. And there may be stories about like the impact of creating that lake.

Of course, you kind of alluded to this earlier, but one of the interesting things about the flooding of these river valleys by the creation of dams is that often one of the purposes of it is to prevent uncontrolled flooding. I know this is...

It's fundamentally changed what the Nile River Valley is that they put all these dams in because there used to be, you know, this uncontrolled seasonal flooding of the Nile that was just part of life in Egypt. And now that in some ways the the water level of the Nile has been to some degree brought under human control. Yeah.

And so you see this sort of thing all over. I have to say, though, I know I wasn't familiar with this example until I started doing research here. There's perhaps fewer examples, few examples that are as stunning as this, but there's a town in northern Italy or a village in northern Italy by the name of Curon. And

And it's apparently pretty famous for a lot of images of this, but I wasn't familiar with it. But this is another case where they had to relocate the town to a higher elevation as the original site was flooded in 1950. So most of the city was abandoned and demoed first, except for a lone 14th century church and its bell tower.

The bell tower still sticks out of the water in rather surrealistic fashion. You'll find images of it where it's just like, oh, here's mountains, here's a lake, and here is a bell tower sticking out of it. I mean, some of these images don't even look real. It looks like some sort of obvious Photoshop image.

But these are legitimate. There are other images of the lake frozen over. And here is the bell tower emerging from the ice. Sometimes you see images where people have ventured out onto the ice close to it. In some of the pictures, I just looked up pictures of it. And in a lot of them, there seems to be

A color gradient on the tower as it sticks up like the stone is a little paler for most of the way up. And then there will be a lower area where the stone is darker. And I don't know if this is the reason, but I wonder if that is literally just from the water level going up and down. And so you can see where the water has been on the on the height of the stone.

Yeah, I believe that is the case. I've read that during the spring when the water is at its lowest, you can apparently see more of the ruins. But yeah, I encourage everyone to look up images of this because it's pretty impressive. And you can't have something like this in the world, of course,

without it inspiring some level of superstition and fiction. And sure enough, there is an Italian supernatural TV drama about this town, or at least, I don't know, it's about the town. It's set in the town and invokes the idea of the town. It is called Couronne. It's apparently, I think it's on Netflix. I don't know if that's like, if that's in the States or if that's just in Italy or other international markets, but C-U-R-O-N, if anyone out there has seen it,

do write in and let us know. I'm wondering how they, I mean, there's so many directions you can go in. You're talking about an abandoned underwater church. Like it's perfect. Well, not to spoil the fun, but to be clear, I think they removed the church. It's just the tower that's there, right? Or at least in the pictures I've seen. Yeah.

I'm uncertain about that. There may be some ruins down there, but then again, if you're, if you're making a supernatural drama TV show, why not have the church down there? You can have whatever you like down there. Merfolk going to church, ghosts, wraiths. I don't know. There's so many directions. Oh, it's like the, the, the pious undead that we talked about, uh, was it last year or the year before all the revenants are going to church?

Yeah, yeah. And this is like a rich folkloric region of Europe, too, that we're talking about. So there's so many ideas you could pull in, you know, ideas that predate the creation of man-made lakes, for sure. I also want to point out, worth looking up are images of the Quran coat of arms, because I'm not sure on the exact history of this, like when they changed it or adapted it, but the coat of arms depicts a tower, the bell tower emerging from the water.

So pretty cool. If you have visited this location, write in and let us know because I'd love to hear your first person account of this haunting bell tower. All right, we're going to go and leave it there. But yeah, go ahead and write in if you have any thoughts on anything we've discussed so far in this series.

Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Listener mail on Mondays, usually an Artifact or Monster Fact episode on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you use social media, you can follow us at any of your favorite social media sites, I think, unless we're not on that site. But we're on a few of them. So, you know, we're on a few of them.

Have a look around. Maybe you can find us. If you're on Instagram, you can find us at STBYM Podcast. Follow us on MySpace. 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.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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I've been getting into the holiday spirit by listening to my favorite seasonal punk rock songs on a Sonos Move 2 speaker. It's a smart speaker, and that's cool, but my favorite thing about it is that I could just lift it up off its charging cradle and take it anywhere in my house and

and it'll fill whatever room I'm in with sound. So whether I'm in the kitchen or the living room or my office, I can take the tunes with me and enjoy the highest quality sound I could ask for. Sonos has great gifts for everyone on your list. Visit sonos.com forward slash tech stuff to wrap up your holiday shopping. That's sonos.com slash tech stuff.

This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff You Missed in History Class. The national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new car. Like a legendary Camry built for performance and available with all-wheel drive, you can count on your new Camry to get anywhere you need to go. Or check out an

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