14 DAY TRIAL // After a preliminary analysis of a set of submerged structures off the island of Damsay, in the United Kingdom, experts revealed that the underwater relics might hold important clues on how to combat sea-level rises. The phenomenon is strongly associated with global warming-induced glacier and ice-cap melting. The stone pieces discovered under the waves are unique in this regard, the BBC News reports.
Archaeologists who had a chance to look at the ruins say that the structures may be several thousands of years old, and that they may represent a line of defense that the people of the time constructed in the face of the same threat we have today – rising sea levels. “We have certainly got a lot of stonework. There are some quite interesting things. You can see voids or entrances. There's this one feature that is like a stone table – you've got a large slab about a meter and a half long and it's sitting up on four pillars or walls, so the next thing we need to do is to get plans and more photographs to try and assess and look for patterns,” University of Aberdeen archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones says.
“The quality and condition of some of the stonework is remarkable. Nothing like this has ever been found on the seabed around the UK,” Wickham-Jones, who was a member of the team that conducted the investigations in freezing temperatures, says. “We've got other sites down on the south coast of England where we have got submerged landscapes, meso-neolithic landscapes as we have here but what we haven't got anywhere else is actual structures. I don't say that's unique – that we'll never find that anywhere else, but so far we haven't seen such things before,” Scottish Oceans Institute geophysicist Richard Bates adds.
University of Dundee geomorphologist Sue Dawson is an expert who has been analyzing why Scotland's islands have been shrinking, while the main island has been rising from the seas. She believes that, in the past, climate change took place at a fast, observable pace, and that the people of the time learned how to adapt to their new conditions. She believes that this type of adaptation is precisely what we need to learn, and then base our future mitigation actions on it.
“Pretty much anywhere in Orkney you can see a vista which has part of man within it, ancient man in the environment. The similar case is going to be in this drowned landscape so the few places we have seen so far are the biggest features but we expect to see much more as we dissect that landscape in finer and finer detail,” she concludes.