on sea levels

At the end of the Ice Age, over a 10,000 year period between 17,000 and 7000 years ago -- just before the supposed beginnings of civilization -- 25 million square kilometers of what were then the most habitable lands on earth were flooded by rising sea levels as the ice caps melted. That's a landmass roughly equivalent in size to the whole of South America (17 million sq kms) and the United States (9.6 million sq kms) added together. Its an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined. And it's also an area on which hardly any archaeology has ever been done. How can we be sure, therefore, that archaeology has got the story of the origins of civilization right when so many of the places where our ancestors lived shortly before what we think of as the start of civilization have never been studied by archaeologists at all?

We have to remember that the world was very different just before the end of the Ice Age. Huge expanses of the northern hemisphere that are centres of habitation today were then buried beneath ice caps three kilometres thick and almost as uninhabitable as the surface of the moon. Our ancestors were forced to migrate -- typically to low-lying coastal areas close to fertile river deltas and the resources of the sea. They could not have anticipated that the ice-caps from which they had fled would melt, causing sea-level to rise more than 400 feet, flooding for ever the lowlands on which they had taken refuge.

In many ways it's a quixotic and seemingly hopeless quest. The sea covers 70 per cent of the earth's surface and as recently as 1997 a chain of submerged mountains 1000 miles long and almost 10,000 feet high was discovered on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The point is that if things on the scale of underwater mountain ranges can go undetected until so late in this age of high technology then it's obviously not going to be easy to find much smaller targets like flooded cities and monuments.Even at the crude mapping level, it's one of the absurdities of scientific priorities that we now have a better map of the surface of Venus than we do of the 88 million square miles of our own planet's sea-floor.

posted by: bargepoled

quoted from Guardian comments but this would appear to come from Graham Hancock's website:

http://www.grahamhancock.com/archive/underworld/