The Edge of Memory

by Patrick Nunn

  50 These dates are reviewed in Krishnaswamy and Nandan (2005, Journal of the Geological Society of India), who reconciled geological evidence for a period of unusually cold winters in India with the description of these in the Ramayana.

  51 The story of the failed bridge is found in the seventh-century poem Setubandha.

  52 We cannot discount the possibility that tectonics – land movements – also had a role in the disappearances (and appearances) of Ramasetu. Uplifted coral reefs, some 4,000 years old, are found on the Indian side of Ramasetu.

  53 A likely chronology for the Pallava Era is from about ad 300, when Sivaskandavarman ascended the throne, until ad 869, when Nandivarman III died.

  54 This information comes from Sundaresh and others (2004, Current Science), who also quote an eighth-century Tamil text describing Mahabalipuram as a place ‘where the ships rode at anchor bent to the point of breaking, laden as they were with wealth, big-trunked elephants and gems of nine varieties in heaps’ (p. 1231).

  55 From an 1869 account quoted by Sundaresh and others (op cit, p. 1232).

  56 Research reported by Rajani and Kasturirangan in the 2013 issue of the Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing.

  57 The Bay of Bengal, which is bordered by the east coast of India (where Mahabalipuram is located), is a structural feature that is experiencing subsidence of as much as 3mm per year resulting from regional tectonic movements in addition to the effects of both sediment loading of the ocean floor and sea-level rise. The Bay also experiences instances of rapid subsidence associated with earthquakes that have contributed to the progressive submergence of the Mahabalipuram area over the past few millennia.

  58 To the south of Mahabalipuram on India’s east coast, there are also stories about submerged places at Poompuhar and Tranquebar. Older perhaps are stories about a submerged continent, Kumari Kandam, off the southern coast of India, which may have influenced European stories about a supposed ‘lost continent’ named Lemuria in the Indian Ocean (Ramaswamy 2004).

  Chapter 6 : What Else Might We Not Realise We Remember?

  1 The greenhorn was the author, who published a detailed analysis of the Kadavu volcano myths (1999, Domodomo [Fiji Museum]). Years later, the cutting of a new road around the base of Nabukelevu revealed volcanic scoria lying above soils in which potsherds were found, unequivocal evidence for eruptive activity here since the human settlement of Kadavu Island. Kadavu is part of a volcanic island arc, similar to many in the Western Pacific, formed by volcanic activity linked to the underthrusting of one crustal plate beneath an adjoining one. The lower plate is forced into the Earth’s interior where it melts, the liquid rock finding its way to the surface above – in places like Kadavu.

  2 An absorbing study of the ‘times of darkness’ in highland New Guinea is by Russell Blong (1982), who employed mineralogical analyses of ash to determine which eruptions from which volcanoes had affected particular places – and might therefore do so in the future.

  3 The quote comes from William Dampier’s (1729) A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland, accessed online through Project Gutenberg in February 2017; the original spellings are quoted on p. 1 of Fire Mountains of the Islands (Johnson 2013).

  4 Lines of intraplate (not plate-boundary) islands in the world’s ocean basins are explained as a result of an oceanic plate (piece of Earth’s crust) moving over a fixed mantle plume, known as a hotspot. As long as the plume keeps leaking liquid rock, a succession of volcanoes will form, the only active one(s) being that closest to the hotspot (Nunn 1994). The best-studied example is the Hawaii-Emperor island-seamount chain that extends nearly 6,000km (3,750 miles) across the North Pacific and has been active for at least 80 million years. The youngest above-sea volcano in this chain is the Big Island (Hawai’i), which is nearing the end of its active life. Yet lurking 1.2km (¾ mile) beneath the ocean surface, 35km (22 miles) to its south-east, lies the active and growing volcano of Lo’ihi, destined one day to spectacularly break the ocean surface and grow into a massive structure like the Big Island is today.

  5 There has been a lot of research on this topic. What has recently emerged as a more compelling explanation of NVP volcanism, supported by teleseismic tomography of the solid earth beneath the area, is edge-driven convection (EDC). This requires abrupt changes in crustal (lithospheric) thickness, expressed along its lower boundary by steps within each of which liquid rock is circulated by convection. Below the NVP there is a step within which liquid rock is circulating, an anomaly in an Australian context, but likely to be responsible for NVP volcanism within the last five million years.

  6 Many evangelical Christian groups interpret the time periods specified in the Bible literally, believing that the Earth since its divine creation is only a few millennia old. To justify this interpretation, it is then deemed necessary to discredit radiometric dating, something that a few authors have gone to tortuous lengths to attempt. A fine review of creationism and its historical antecedents is the book by Arthur McCalla (2013).

  7 A billion here means 1,000,000,000. For some of the oldest rocks on Earth, other techniques involving even slower rates of isotope decay are used, including the awesome rubidium-strontium method in which 87Rb decays to 87Sr with a half-life of 50 billion years.

  8 Tennateona was so cruel and savage that some people, to save themselves from him, ‘laid themselves on ant heaps and let the ants cover their bodies as if dead’ (Smith 1880: 24).

  9 The earliest written version of this story (much was misquoted subsequently) is found on pp. 14–15 of the book by Christina Smith, a missionary who lived in the Mt Gambier area from 1854 until her death in 1893. She learnt to speak the local Bungandidj language and recorded numerous stories of the Buandig (Booandik) people (Smith 1880).

  10 Dating of materials below (and therefore predating) the youngest lava flows at Mt Gambier show a maximum age for these of perhaps 4,300 years ago. A similar date of 4,930 years ago was obtained from Mt Schank.

  11 The quotation is from p. 102 of Dawson (1881); other stories are reported herein and another about the eruption of Mt Buninyong by Howitt (1904).

  12 A good example of the arbitrariness of history is that Mt Eccles was originally Mt Eeles, named for a prominent war veteran, but a draughting error in the 1850s rendered it ‘Eccles’, which name has been used since!

  13 Depth-age calculation from Figure 4.3 in Chapter 4 shows that the sea level around Australia was 33m (108ft) below its present level between 10,150 and 10,750 years ago. A likely age for the Tyrendarra flow is around 36,000 years ago.

  14 The name Gerinyelam, rendered more recently as Derrinallum, for Mt Elephant is recorded on p. 179 of Smyth (1878). The dates for the most recent eruptions of Mt Elephant are reported in an anonymous article but appear to be estimates.

  15 Information from www.kanawinkageopark.org.au, accessed in March 2017.

  16 For example, a 2017 study by Ben Cohen and others stated that ‘the cause of the young lava field volcanoes in Queensland is not well known … no single model satisfies all observations’ (Quaternary Geochronology, p. 80).

  17 Quote from p. 90 in Cohen’s work (see previous note).

  18 This date is actually a range from 5,000 to 9,000 years ago; the median age is 7,000 years ago. The unusually large error ( ± 2,000 years) is because a comparatively new dating technique (40Ar/39Ar) was employed; future refinements are likely to see error margins reduced.

  19 I am not sure what to make of the Aboriginal story, recorded about 1917 ‘halfway up the Tully River’, 100km (60 miles) north-east of Kinrara, which ‘related how long ago … fire and flames had erupted suddenly from the rocks and a rain of stones had fallen in the surroundings’ (Mjöberg 1918: 141). The explanation given was that this had been the work of an evil spirit seeking revenge; it was noted that at that time, local people ‘avoided getting too close to the place of the eruption’. The problem is that there is no known youthful volcano in this area, so it is possible this story came here from s
omewhere else.

  20 This Mamu/Ngajan version of the story was told by George Watson in the Mamu dialect of Dyirbal. It is summarised on pp. 153–154 of linguist Robert Dixon’s entertaining memoir (1984). An alternative version, told by Dick Moses in the coastal dialect of Yidiny, is written in both the original and translation in another of Dixon’s books (Text 3 in Dixon 1991).

  21 The Fujisan legend quoted comes from the landmark compilation by Dorothy Vitaliano (1973), which also contains examples from other parts of the world.

  22 For a popular yet scientifically rigorous account of Krakatau, I recommend the book by Simon Winchester (2003). Indonesia was also the site of the even larger Toba supereruption about 75,000 years ago (on Sumatra Island), which produced some 2,800km3 (670mi3) of material; in 1883 Krakatau produced about 12. By pouring so much airborne material into the Earth’s atmosphere, the Toba event may have caused a ‘volcanic winter’ that blotted out the sun, causing plant growth to diminish to a point where humanity became imperilled; people everywhere starved to death. The Toba supereruption was once believed to have been responsible for a bottleneck in modern human evolution, although subsequent research suggests that this view might be overstated; people in India appear to have coped, and those in East Africa were apparently unaffected.

  23 The date of 16,000 years ago for the draining of Lake Bandung near Tangkuban Perahu comes from research by Dam and colleagues (1996, Journal of Southeast Asian Earth Sciences). I have woven together several versions of the story of Sangkuriang and Dayang Sumbi, the principal published version being that in Vitaliano (1973).

  24 This story is found in the memoir by Charachidzé (1986).

  25 Using the potassium-argon (K-Ar) technique, lavas from Kazbek and Elbrus and numerous other Caucasian volcanoes have been dated (Lebedev, 2014, Journal of Volcanology and Seismology). In about ad 320, an eruption of Elbrus caused avalanches that buried ancient soils (palaeosols), which have been dated using radiocarbon to determine the age of the eruption (1,780 ± 70 years ago). The first indication that ice-capped Elbrus might be about to spring back to life was when scientists noted moss growing above cracks in the ice surface, suggesting that heat from beneath the ice was escaping to the surface along these cracks. Subsequent investigations confirm that the mountain’s top is hotter than would be expected – it sits more than 5,600m (18,370ft) above sea level – perhaps because of the filling of a shallow subterranean magma chamber (see https://sputniknews.com/voiceofrussia/2010/08/02/14236033.html, accessed in February 2017).

  26 Bacteria do not have brains because they are unicellular, but it could be argued that bacteria have ‘minds’ since the receptors on the outside of their cells are designed to identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods that determine in which direction they travel.

  27 The clathrate-gun hypothesis is the subject of a book by Kennett and others (2002). In fairness, it should be pointed out that there are other explanations for the collapse of methane-hydrate-filled sediment piles along continental margins, including one involving changes in water temperature (associated with glacial-interglacial cycles) that simply causes the ice casings of the methane to melt, releasing the gas in large quantities almost simultaneously and leading to collapse. Scientists have worked backwards from discoveries like that of finding that collapsed material at the edge of the underwater Amazon Delta contained some 10 per cent methane hydrates, a strong indication that the dissociation of these caused the associated collapse.

  28 This event is the Storegga Slide, the main part dated to 8,100 ± 250 years ago. Wave heights associated with the Storegga Slide were calculated by Stein Bondevik and colleagues (2005, Marine and Petroleum Geology); the scattering of stone tools consistent with tsunami impact was deduced for a site in Inverness by Alastair Dawson and colleagues (1990, Journal of Archaeological Science).

  29 The destruction of worlds by fire, flood and earthquake is a persistent theme in Norse mythology (Gaiman 2017), perhaps most famously in anticipatory descriptions of Ragnarok, the future world-ending battle, the equivalent of Armageddon in Greco-Roman cultures.

  30 How and why islands can disappear is explained in my 2009 book, Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific (Nunn 2009), now available to listen to – see https://tinyurl.com/lbrrgfa.

  31 More details about the original Teonimenu story (and stories of other vanished islands in the vicinity) are found, together with a cogent geological explanation, in the work by myself and others (2006, South Pacific Studies). The transcription of an original story about Teonimenu by Zacchariah Haununumaesihaa’a, collected from Ulawa Island by Tony Heorake, is found in Appendix 1 of my 2009 book (Nunn 2009).

  32 This remarkable story was told by Wolfe and colleagues in the 1994 Journal of Geophysical Research.

  33 This extraordinary piece of cartographic detective work was reported by Filmer and others in the 1994 issue of Marine Geophysical Researches and is supported by indigenous stories recalling a ‘large disaster’ in the area around the year 1800.

  34 Quote from p. 463 in the book on Yurok Myths by Kroeber (1976).

  35 Coastal settlements throughout the Cascadia region (north-west USA and south-west Canada) have been affected by abrupt, earthquake-induced subsidence; a wealth of oral stories about these events is reported in the 1996 volume of American Antiquity.

  36 Earthquakes are estimated to occur only every 2,000 years along the Sparta Fault. That is why the timing of the destructive 464 BC event may be so significant for an understanding of Plato’s thinking about the role of catastrophic events in societal collapse.

  37 Chapter XI of Book III of Thucydides (431 BC). Geoscientists remember Thucydides as the first person to correctly infer a connection between earthquakes and tsunamis. The following is a continuation of the quote used in the text. ‘The cause, in my opinion, of this phenomenon must be sought in the earthquake. At the point where its shock has been the most violent, the sea is driven back and, suddenly recoiling with redoubled force, causes the inundation. Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen.’

  38 Plato is generally considered the originator of the ‘Socratic dialogue’, a literary device based on oral debates. The details of the Atlantis story appear in two of his dialogues, Critias and Timaeus. Plato’s most prominent disciple, Aristotle, probably reflected his master’s teachings when he pondered the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word in his Rhetoric (350 BC); he identified three modes, the third of which explained that persuasion is achieved through the speech itself when a truth (or an apparent truth) is proven by means of the persuasive arguments suited to the case in question. Indeed.

  39 In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, one eyewitness stated that ‘we saw around us a miracle, a terrible miracle. The forest was not our forest. I have never seen such a forest in my life. It was so unfamiliar. We had here a dense forest, a dark forest, an old forest. And now there was in many places no forest at all. On the mountains all the trees were lying down and it was light; one could see far away. And it was impossible to go under the mountains, through the bogs: some trees were standing there, others were down, still others were bent, and some trees had fallen one upon another. Many trees were burnt, dry trunks and moss were still burning and smoking’ (part of Akulina’s story, quoted in the paper by Suslov in the 2006 issue of the Russian Institute on Anomalous Phenomena (RIAP) Bulletin).

  40 This is the English translation in the 1996 issue of Meteoritics & Planetary Science of part of the original account by Antenor Álvarez (1926).

  41 Australian microtektites – tektites small enough to circulate some distance in the atmosphere – have been found in Chinese loess and in accumulations of eroded material around the Transantarctic Mountains.

  42 During a visit to the Henbury meteorite crater field in June 1931 by a group from the Kyancutta Museum (South Australia), a journey of more than 4,800km (3,000 miles) by ‘motor truck’, contact was made with ‘a local prospector’ who supplied the
Aboriginal name for this site. A neat summary of traditions by Duane Hamacher about the Henbury craters was published online in The Conversation on 4 March 2016 (http://theconversation.com/finding-meteorite-impacts-in-aboriginal-oral-tradition-38052).

  43 One example is of Wolfe Creek crater (Western Australia), which formed from bolide impact about 300,000 years ago. Long before Western-trained scientists had worked out its origin, local Djaru people had stories consistent with this, even though its formation must have gone unwitnessed by people. One account by Djaru man Jack Jugarie states that ‘a star bin fall down. It was a small star, not so big. It fell straight down and hit the ground. It fell straight down and made that hole round, a very deep hole. The earth shook when that star fell down’ (quoted in Sanday 2007: 26).

  44 From pp. 32–33 of The Adnyamathanha People, produced by the Education Department of South Australia.

  45 This story was collected from Aboriginal informants in the Shoalhaven region by Ellen Anderson, between perhaps 1870 and 1920, and comes from pp. 192–193 of Australian Legends by Charles W. Peck (1933).

  46 Flood myths feature in almost every long-established culture (Dundes 1988), and in most cases probably represent stories of successive flood events.

  47 A trailblazing survey of preservice (trainee) teachers in the United States found that ‘sizeable minorities … awaited more evidence’ as to whether fantastic beasts (like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster) were real (see Susan Losh, 2011, Journal of Science and Education, p. 473). The study concluded that ‘more training is needed for preservice educators in the critical evaluation of material evidence’. I agree.