How rising seas transformed dry land into Venice lagoon — SkimNews
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- Samuele Ongaro at the University of Southampton and colleagues combined seismic data with sedimentary cores from coastal basins of northern Italy, Slovenia and northern Croatia to model sea-level change and reconstruct past landscapes across the region over the past 10,000 years.
- Quaternary Science Reviews published the results, which show that the present-day Venice lagoon was once dry land extending more than 30 miles from the coast.
- Trieste was previously an area of hills overlooking swamps and lagoons, the reconstruction found.
- Sea level rose in fits and starts starting just over 10,000 years ago, sometimes by up to 25mm a year.
- Mesolithic hunter-gatherers shifted their hunting and fishing activities as the rising water forced them to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
- Three distinct phases marked the most dramatic changes to the northern Adriatic coastline over the 10,000-year window the study covers.
- Settlements and the advent of farming took hold in the familiar landscape during roughly 6,000 years of relative sea-level stability that followed those phases.
Why it matters: The three rapid-rise phases, at times adding 25mm of sea level in a year, pushed Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to shift their hunting and fishing grounds; the roughly 6,000 years of relative stability that followed is what the reconstruction ties to the formation of settlements and the advent of farming in the northern Adriatic.
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