The
Mediterranean is full of beautiful vistas but this stunning scenery is more
than just a feast for the eyes.
Throughout history, the landscape has had a major influence on how we
believed our planet works.
Civilisations around the Mediterranean held a fantastic range of beliefs
about how the world worked.
In
ancient Greece a whole legion of supernatural beings are believed to have ruled
the earth. There were numerous
different gods to whom great temples were dedicated, plus assorted nymphs who
lived in streams and trees and a range of hideous monsters. Your average Greek citizen believed
that these beings were responsible for absolutely everything from love to hate,
to harvest and death.
The
Greek gods who looked down on the world from heaven above appeared to be a
vengeful bunch, ruling over earth with an iron fist. Not
surprisingly, the accent Greeks were keen to keep these mortals happy otherwise
they could be in for a rough ride.
One god they really didn’t want to upset was the feared earth shaker,
ruler of the sea, the mighty Poseidon.
Poseidon
was notorious for his bad temper; displeased he would cause volcanoes to erupt,
the earth to shake and the sea to surge.
The ancients offered lavish gifts for Poseidon, in the hope he wouldn’t
visit them with his roth, but despite their best efforts, throughout ancient
Greek history, this particular god would often flex his muscles. One place
where Poseidon was said to have inverted his fury with extraordinary effort was
the Gulf of Corinth in North Penoploese of Mainland Greece. Archaeologists believe that there
once stood an ancient and once thriving city, Hellenic, built as a sacred place
to worship Poseidon but despite this, he struck the city with total catastrophe
and the sea swallowed it up.
We now
believe that the real cause of the catastrophe wasn’t Poseidon’s fury, but a
fault in the earth, which has a habit of making the ground in front of it
suddenly drop. The Hellenic fault
is clearly visible as a sheer rock face, which runs for over 19miles. It was made naturally, as a result of a
geological tug of war. The earth
service is broken up into what’s called, tectonic plates, and the whole of
Greece sits on the Southern edge of one of those called the European
Plate. We now know that this plate
is being pulled by its neighbour the African plate. I am sure most people who have studied or read anything on
earth science will be very much aware of what happens at these plate boundaries,
but for anyone who isn’t aware I will give a simple explanation with an analogy.
As the
plates get tugged, it stretchers, that is because the rocks deep underground
are so hot that they act like gluey caramel, think of the inside of a mars bar,
but, at the surface, the crust is rigid, think of the outer chocolate coating
of that mars bar… it doesn’t stretch when you pull it apart right, it forms a
crack, which is exactly what we can see in earth, as a fault line. But, like anything, it is not that
simple. The earth just doesn’t
open up. Here is another
analogy. Suppose this fault was
represented as a gap between too books, when the rigid crust is pulled from
either side, the fault moves by going on a slant, one side of the fault goes
up, the other side goes down. This
phenomena was felt at this fault in a earthquake in 1861, and the evidence is
that deep grooves appeared in the rock, appearing in seconds, the rock on one
side slid down, scratching the surface of the other as it went, and this is the
secret to how Hellenic was destroyed.
The ground beneath it was crashing all the way down below sea level
allowing the waters of the Mediterranean to crash in and completely submerge
the city. Although this at that
time was believed to be done by the roth of the gods, this particular disaster
influenced a famous Greek philosopher to think differently.
Aristotle, who may have been the first gem
of irrational geological thought, introducing a new paradigm shift towards the science of the inner workings of the earth. What an awesome dude :)
To be continued.........
To be continued.........
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