The Stonehenge Enigma (Prehistoric Britain Book 1)

by Langdon, Robert John

  If pressure is applied – like a ice cap on the land it will sink in relation to the sea. When released it will spring back, the fact that it is higher only reinforces the view that a see-saw motion will continue as a minor ‘after effect’, as we see in earthquakes, getting progressively smaller over time.

  Is that what we are seeing in the SE corner of Britain?

  If we are experiencing a smaller ‚after shock’ and going down by 1mm per annum, that eventually could stop and we may go up by 0.5mm in the future – this would mean that the isostatic transformation affected all the country directly, which indirectly effect the groundwater levels.

  Glaciation - is defined as the formation, movement and recession of glaciers. At present, glaciers cover about 10% of the world’s land area (14.9 million km2). Most of this is under the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets; only about 700 000 km2 is covered by the thousands of glaciers in the remainder of the world. Glaciations have been much more extensive in the past than it is today, occurring mostly as large continental ice sheets.1

  So what effect does Isostatic transformation have on the groundwater levels?

  If Britain 20,000 years ago was under the influence of say 110,000 giga tonnes of ice the land would have been squashed at least 800m (half a kilometre) below its original surface, if we take into account the result of the Great Lakes case study. Even without any additional water, the groundwater table would be on or above surface height, as the ice melted the land would ‚rebound back’ very, very slowly. As we see in Scotland this rebound is still happening some 10,000 years after the last ice had left.

  This ice was replaced by water, not a little bit of water but a huge flood of water, recent studies in the US has shown that this release of water had devastating effects in regions where this water was trapped behind the melting ice and caused massive destruction upon release.

  Case Study - The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood by David R. Montgomery 2012.

  “Geologists long rejected the notion that cataclysmic flood had ever occurred—until one of them found proof of a Noah-like catastrophe in the wildly eroded river valleys of Washington State.

  After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I had become embarrassed that I hadn’t yet seen the deep canyons where tremendous Ice Age floods scoured down into solid rock to sculpt the scablands. So I decided to help lead a field trip for students to see the giant erosion scars on the local landforms.

  We drove across the Columbia River and continued eastward, dropping into Moses Coulee, a canyon with vertical walls of layered basalt. We gathered the students on a small rise and asked them how the canyon had formed. They immediately ruled out wind and glaciers. The valley was not U-shaped like a typical glacial valley, and none of us could imagine how wind might gouge a canyon out of hard basalt. But neither were there rivers or streams. After a while I pointed out that we were standing on a pile of gravel. I asked how the rounded granite pebbles came to be there when the closest source of granite lay over the horizon. Silence.

  Hiking through eastern Washington canyons littered with exotic boulders is a standard field trip for beginning geologists. It takes a while to register what you see. A dry waterfall hundreds of feet high in the middle of the desert. Giant potholes where no river flows today. Granite boulders parked in a basalt canyon. Gradually the contradictions fall into place and a story unfolds. Where did wayward boulders the size of a car or house comes from? What was the source of the water that moved them around and carved the falls? Today, even novice geologists can conjure up eastern Washington’s giant floods.

  Long before the discovery of the scablands, geologists dismissed the role of catastrophic floods in interpreting European geology. By the end of the 19th century such ideas not only were out of fashion but were geological heresy. When J Harlen Bretz uncovered evidence of giant floods in eastern Washington in the 1920s, it took most of the 20th century for other geologists to believe him. Geologists had so thoroughly vilified the concept of great floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence of one.

  Bretz was a classic field geologist and a controversial figure throughout his career. In 1925 he presented the story of the region’s giant floods, seeing what others at first could not—and then would not—see. He spent his lifetime piecing together the story of how a raging wall of water hundreds of feet high roared across eastern Washington, carving deep channels before cascading down the Columbia River Gorge as a wall of water high enough to turn Oregon’s Willamette Valley into a vast backwater lake.

  Isostatic Transformation

  Bretz found exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above the highest recorded river level. In the scablands, a desolate region stripped of soil, he came across dry waterfalls and potholes hundreds of feet above the modern river. Gigantic gravel bars deposited within dry valleys implied deep, fast-flowing water. Streamlined hills rose like islands, extending more than 100 feet above the scoured-out channel ways.

  He realized the chaotic landscape had been carved by an enormous flood that chewed deep channels through hundreds of feet of solid basalt. The ancient flood deposited an enormous delta around Portland, Oregon, backing up flow into the Willamette Valley. The waters, he eventually realized, could have come from catastrophic drainage of Lake Missoula, an ancient, glacier-dammed lake in western Montana.

  Bretz was ridiculed until 1940, when geologist Joe Pardee described giant ripple marks on the bed of Lake Missoula. The 50-foot-high ripples, he said, were formed by fast-flowing currents and not by the sluggish bottom water of a lake. Only sudden failure of the glacial dam could have released the 2,000-foot-deep lake. The catastrophic release of 600 cubic miles of water through a narrow gap would sweep away everything in its path. In 1979, when Bretz was 97 years old, the Geological Society of America awarded him its highest honor, the Penrose Medal.

  Recognition of the Missoula flood helped other geologists identify similar landforms in Asia, Europe, Alaska, and the American Midwest, as well as on Mars. There is now compelling evidence for many gigantic ancient floods where glacial ice dams failed time and again: At the end of the last glaciation, some 10,000 years ago, giant ice-dammed lakes in Eurasia and North America repeatedly produced huge floods. In Siberia, rivers spilled over drainage divides and changed their courses. England’s fate as an island was sealed by erosion from glacial floods that carved the English Channel. These were not global deluges as described in the Genesis story of Noah, but were more focused catastrophic floods taking place throughout the world. They likely inspired stories like Noah’s in many cultures, passed down through generations.

  Since devastating floods were a fact of life on the margins of the world’s great ice sheets, people in those areas probably witnessed them. Early missionaries in eastern Washington reported stories of a great flood among Yakima and Spokane tribes, who could identify locations where survivors sought refuge. An Ojibwa Indian legend from around Lake Superior tells of a great snow that fell one September at the beginning of time: A bag contained the sun’s heat until a mouse nibbled a hole in it. The warmth spilled over, melting the snow and producing a flood that rose above the tops of the highest pines. Everyone drowned except for an old man who drifted about in his canoe rescuing animals. The native inhabitants of the Willamette Valley told stories of a time the valley filled with water, forcing everyone to flee up a mountain before the waters receded.

  Did survivors of such events pass their stories down through the ages? Could the biblical story of Noah, on some level, be real?

  Case Study - Europe’s Lost World

  In my search for the builders of Stonehenge, we have looked in-depth to a land just a couple of hundred miles to the east called Doggerland. We have found to our astonishment, when observing the seismic surveying of this area of the North Sea, that the sinking of Doggerland (between 9000 - 4000BCE) gives us a ‚blueprint’ of not only how Doggerland, but moreover, Brit
ain would have looked directly after the last Ice Age. This is an ‚edit’ extract for copyright reasons of a passage from the recent book ‚Europe’s lost world’ - the rediscovery of Doggerland by Gaffney et al 2009, who have also studied the same region.

  If there are problems with interpreting what the Doggerland vegetation looked like in the past, presumably we are on safer ground with respect to the various landscape features identified through the seismic analysis of the North Sea. After all, we know what rivers looked like, don’t we?

  Anastomosing Rivers

  Unfortunately, most people derive their impression of how the river valleys looked in the past from how modern valleys looked today and therein lays the problem. Large modern rivers like the Thames, Trent, Seven and Avon, run through broad alluvial flood plans and the clays in the flood plain are now a major agricultural resource. Somewhere in the vast expanse of cultivated lands that exist in river valleys will actually be a river whose present course only takes up, perhaps 10% of the available land in the flood plain. There is occasional flooding, but generally the river course is stable.

  This has NOT always been the case.

  Work on the sedimentary and environmental records of the river valleys of Britain has clearly suggested that our image of a river valley is a recent creation. Modern valleys, particularly those with clay fills seem to date mainly from the Bronze Age or Early Iron Age onwards2. They also appear to be a product of the expansion in agriculture that occurred at about this time and the associated increase in soil erosion that led to large amounts of clay and slit entering into the river valleys.

  During the Holocene, these rivers would have changed. This is indicated by a number of studies from Britain that clearly show the nature of early Holocene large river systems. Over time, silt would have built up over these valleys. Waterside vegetation and woodland would have developed and stabilised the channel sides, giving some degree of permanence to the course of the rivers.

  However, the rivers appear to have maintained a mesh-like appearance, with channels filling the whole of the available floodplain even though these could be several miles across. These channels are relatively unstable and when they failed, they did so spectacularly. Once the bank sides collapsed in a storm or flood, the underlying sands and gravels would shift at speed. Channels would fail and rivers would shift violently across the floodplain. The result is an ‘anatomising’ river system that occupies most of the valley floor. This produces a floodplain that bears no resemblance to those of today.

  Abandoned river channels are overgrown by meadows, grasslands and scrub woodland. Flatlands can be expanded to become large areas of swamp, reed beds and Carr woodland. Gallery woodlands of willow and at a later date, alder dominate the channel sides with more distant and stable areas developing groves of mixed deciduous woodlands. Given the dominance of this kind of river system in the past in Britain, similar environments must be present in the area of the large river systems that dominated both Doggerland and Britain.

  Is what we are seeing on the floor of the North Sea a ‘blue print’ of how Britain as a whole looked in Mesolithic times?

  Extensive areas of dense reed bed, wet carr, willow, birch and alder woodland, open pools of water and marshes that attracted man. These ‘wet’ environments were connected by a labyrinth of rivers and canals so Mesolithic man navigated this land and surrounding lands such as Britain, France and Germany, as the only way you could move from area to area without swimming and leaving your goods behind would be by a boat. But according to present theories, boats will not be used for another 5,000 years.

  Proof of Hypothesis No.3

  The Isostatic transformation of the landmass during the last ice age that left the landmass nearly half a mile below the sea level would have raised the level of the WATER TABLE relative to the landmass.

  Chapter 3 – WATER, water everywhere....

  Before we look at further supporting data for the flood after the Ice Age, we need to see if it is possible that there is other evidence that has either been overlooked or incorrectly dated. To do so, we must understand how geology is mapped and dated.

  Geologists have found evidence that the River Avon, which runs near Stonehenge, was much higher in the past than at present. They estimate that in 400,000 BCE the groundwater was 30 – 40m higher than it is today. Our hypothesis indicates that the rise in the groundwater table was due to the Isostatic Transformation after the last Ice Age. We believe these dates currently indicated by geologists are slightly out of sequence. The Geology of Britain is the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of the Earth’s materials, including the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed.

  The challenge lies in the fact that geologists are looking at millions of years of history within their data, whereas archaeologists only look at the last 10,000 years. By investigating such a vast expanse of time, geologists find it more difficult to identify all detailed aspects of the last 10,000 years, referred to as the Holocene Period, as it only represents a tiny proportion of the time span they investigate. Another problem is the way geologists date sub-soils and mineral layers.

  If we look at the known flood plans of the local river Avon we notice that there is clear evidence that this river has flooded in the past. However, how this evidence is dated is another question. In a publication ‘Crustal uplift in Southern England: evidence from a river terrace records’3 Illustrated that there were several terraces from the river Avon still visible in the Hampshire basin which they called T5 - T10.

  ‘Little has been done to determine the age of either the terrace sequence or the older River Gravels in the Avon Valley’.

  In short ‘we don’t really know’, but they go on:

  ‘However, interglacial sediments within the two lowest terraces of the Solent have been assigned to OIS 7 and OIS5e (Allen et al., 1996) Organic Remains of probable Ipswichian(OIS 5e) age (Barber and Brown, 1987) and probable early Devensian age (Green et al.,1983) have been described from sediments underlying low-level terraces within the Avon valley, but at higher elevations in the valleys of the Avon and its tributaries, no organic remains have ever been described’.

  They imply that these terraces are between the Ipswich (135,000 BCE to 71,000 BCE) and the Devensian period (71,000 BCE to 12,000 BCE) - clearly Geologists estimate dates with no degrees of relative accuracy, which we try to use in Archaeology. But what is quite remarkable is the ‘probable’ word - where is the carbon dating? This ‘shot in the dark’ is confirmed from this extract from the document:

  ‘Palaeolithic artefacts are, however present in the terrace deposits of the Avon at various sites (Blackmore, 1864, 1865, 1867; Reid, 1885; Harding and Bridgland, 1998)....

  Material in undoubted primary context does not seem to have been described, but the bulk of the archaeology appears to have come from Terrace 7 (Clarke and Green, 1987) for which an age in the middle Pleistocene can, thus assumed...’

  So the geologists are dating segments of River Terraces by Archeological finds!

  So how are the Archaeologists dating the finds in the first place, well there are two options. Firstly it can be done by the condition of the find; in this case these are Stone Axes. Now to be honest One Stone Axe looks very much like another, depending on the skill level of the ‘knapper’. Archaeologists take a guess that the better quality of the knapper the younger the stone tool.

  Bet you can see the problem here!!

  If the stone knapper was just rubbish, then the tool would be given a date later than the true date of production - that’s far too easy to do so archaeologists confirm the dates by where the find was laying in the geological record.

  But hang on a minute!