Discovery of man-made structures on the seabed off Orkney – the well preserved structures are near the island of Damsay and some of the structures may date back thousands of years.
One structure found was a stone “table” with 4 legs.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8416600.stm
This is fascinating.
Did you see Man on Earth on Monday, Channel 4, Tony Robinson presenting a series about previous violent climate changes. To quote the Independent entertainment guide:
"... rewinds 8,000 years to the end of the last great Ice Age to show how Britain finally became an island and how the Black Sea was formed within one generation. It all began in northern Canada as ice sheets containing 900,000 trillion tonnes of water melted into the Atlantic."
What it didn't tell us was what caused such a dramatic climate change.
In the last OAS do the talk on these explorations said it could be that those off the Damsay coast could relate to a graveyard belonging to the monastery [of nuns] here, so it struck me that perhaps the 'table' could be the altar of an earlier kirk
I'm a keen diver and am seriously thinking about starting an underwater archeology course - there must be a large amount of stuff underwater around the UK in quite shallow waters.
The Channel 4 program on the North Sea was brilliant. Would love to see someone sponsoring a high detail sonar survey of UK inland waters......
The major climate change for the North Sea areas was the end of the last glaciation and the rise in sea water. The ice mass being removed from Scotland has had the reverse effect and most of the land mass there has been rising since 8/9,000 BC - I was brought up and lived the first 21 years of my life on land near a "raised beach" area 2 miles away from the sea on the west coast of Scotland, caused by just this process.
The Orkney Islands sinking seems to be separate from this and due to plate tectonics from what I can find - there is a document at
fettes.com/Orkney/field%20guide%20West%20Shore.doc
news item with 2 photos in "Current Archaeology" for March 2010