Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible

The dimensions of the offshore islands may be estimated in proportion to these respective two sets of measurements, so that the southern island measures approximately 6.6 × 3.8 km (ca. 19.7 km^2) and the northern island 10.7 × 5.8 km (ca. 48.7 km^2), and that the islands lie ca. 3.5–4.0 km from the mainland shore. However, these measurements must be viewed with extreme caution given the poor areal accuracy of the Gough Map.

Later in the article they estimate that the sea erosion was 5-10m/y and the alleged islands disappeared in 5 approximately centuries, so a width of 5km is consistent.

lumost• 4 years ago

It does make you wonder if the legend of atlantis is simply due to a myriad of ancient civilizations that vanished under rising oceans. Given human population centers cluster around ocean ports/rivers with easy access to fresh drinking water. It seems entirely plausible that estimates of human population size at the end of the last ice age may be substantially off.

swayvil• 4 years ago

Through the grinder of mythology black can become white and up can become down. You can't trust it except in the blurriest sense.

This is what makes science so special and revolutionary. The alternative being normal horrible epistemology like everybody does it all the time since forever.

And yes, even science can be mythologized.

bertil• 4 years ago

There’s a fairly credible theory that Atlantis was a port city in the Richat Structure.

rustymonday2• 4 years ago

Here's the thing about Atlantis: even if you know exactly where it is, and even if you can prove it, you'll find it's nearly impossible to sell.

The best way to be compensated for its discovery is probably to make a documentary, but this has been done dozens of times already by people who claimed to know where it is. Networks only have so much appetite for it. And even without that hurdle, it's extremely difficult to get a hold of anyone who might be able to help.

And if you went the academic route, you'd essentially be publishing the information for free, running the risk of someone else taking all the credit.

How would you even go about selling Atlantis? I'm seriously asking.

tsimionescu• 4 years ago

There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.

pyinstallwoes• 4 years ago

That is certainly the fringe theory of the long lost civilizatin of Mu (contintent in the Pacific?). Apparently it, Atlantis, and another empire essentially sub-orbital bombed themselves into non-existence causing entire landmasses to submerge. That's the fringe, out there theory anyway.

ljf3• 4 years ago

Don't forget about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger land (I'm sure out near European ancestors wouldn't have).

That is only about 6000bce - when Britain was joined to mainland Europe.

The piece that blows me away is how shallow the North Sea is, but also how all that sea level rise is down to glacial melt - amazing just how much water is/was tied up in glaciers (and the Antarctica).

balentio• 4 years ago

Wasn't this posted to Hacker News before?

gus_massa4• 4 years ago

I only could find this from another URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542953 (2 points | 12 days ago | 0 comments)

Note that from the FAQ:

Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

I sometimes link old post with low points or few comments when one of the comments is very interesting and explain or debunk the post. But in this case there is nothing interesting in the old discussion. (Is the other URL better? Both look similar to me.)

jbverschoor• 4 years ago

Why do people always think that things from the past are simply not real.

“They”(us in the future) could say the exact same thing about all the things that are real in our current lives.

All these mythical creatures (soon to be extinct)

Having such a surplus of fresh water.

At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created

nelblu• 4 years ago

It is human nature to glorify the past and romanticize the greatness of "those days". There is nothing wrong in maintaining a healthy skeptical mind towards outrageous claims. Further the onus of proof lies on the person making the claim.

fritztastic2• 4 years ago

At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created

That reminds me of a (reportedly fake) quote attributed to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum:

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.”

simonh7• 4 years ago

There are plenty of things from the past that are absolutely real. We have tons of physical evidence for settlements all over the world throughout history. I’m sure there’s more yet to be discovered. But until we discover it, it’s just hearsay.

There may well have been a real place that inspired Plato’s mention if Atlantis, but only one. Not the many hundreds of possible locations suggested over the centuries. They can’t all be Atlantis, if any of them are.

ecolonsmak• 4 years ago

200yrs from now well meaning discussion will consider if the long extinct elephant was in fact mythical

MichaelCollins6• 4 years ago

The way of vulgar skepticism is to assume something doesn't exist until it has been proven to exist.

In cases like the Lock Ness monster or invisible pink dragons in my garage, that approach happens to yield good results (and so would blanket generic cynicism.) But it falls apart quick when you stray very far from the fantastical, e.g. "masks have not yet been proven to work, therefore masks don't work."

A bayesian approach to skepticism is much better than vulgar skepticism. Bayes asks the skeptic to consider the general outlandishness of a possibility P(A), the basic likelihood of apparent evidence occurring regardless of the hypothesis P(B), and the likelihood of there being evidence at all even if the hypothesis were correct P(B|A).

alar44• 4 years ago

Lack of evidence? What a stupid comment.

onion2k• 4 years ago

Why do people always think that things from the past are simply not real.

Because the universe popped into existence 1 nanosecond ago.

Try proving me wrong...

fritztastic2• 4 years ago

It's always interesting (for me) to learn of lost lands- from before humans were around, too, but especially those mentioned in human stories. There are many of these [1]- some of which are the subject of fascinating and informative documentaries, such as this one about Doggerland [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_lands?wprov=sfla1

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo

sveme• 4 years ago

Pretty similar to the story of Rungholt[1], which is clearly no longer myth, but fact, with lots of remnants being found.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt

paganel2• 4 years ago

Evidence from the Roman cartographer Ptolemy suggests the coastline 2000 years ago may have been some 13 km further out to sea than it is today.

This sort of stuff doesn't get repeated often enough in this day and age, we live with the illusion that the sea levels as we now have them should remain the same over the next centuries no matter what.

988747• 4 years ago

It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural, as opposed to being caused by industrial CO2 emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions is a huge business right now.

StanislavPetrov4• 4 years ago

It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural

Sea level changes are absolutely natural and have fluctuated wildly over the history of the planet. The sea level was 360 feet lower 13,000 years ago. Certainly human activity has a measurable effect on the environment but it is simply absurd to pretend that our environment (including sea levels) isn't in a constant state of flux.

thrwyoilarticle• 4 years ago

Conspiracy theory hogwash. Doggerland is well-discussed.

withinboredom• 4 years ago

I imagine that most people haven’t thrown gasoline on a fire. Surely they can’t understand making something bad way more worse than it was.

MichaelCollins6• 4 years ago

General knowledge and popular culture acknowledge natural climate changes. However I think people often overestimate the length of time involved in those changes, *overestimating the amount of time that has passed since dramatic climate changes in the past. E.g. knowing of "the ice age" but estimating that it happened millions of years ago and took millions of years for these climate changes to naturally occur.

It's certainly not a secret that Manhattan Island was covered by nearly half a mile of ice less than 20,000 years ago, nobody is suppressing this knowledge, but nevertheless I think there's a wide gap between public knowledge and common knowledge.

simonh7• 4 years ago

Firstly sea levels have nothing to do with this at all, these coastal changes were caused by erosion.

Anyway some sea level changes are natural, some look to be man made. Just because natural changes can happen, it doesn’t follow that man made one’s don't happen, or if they do that it’s ok.

gus_massa4• 4 years ago

Note that the change of this part of the coastline was caused by sea erosion of the cliff, not a raise of the sea level.

cma2• 4 years ago

You are mixing up land erosion with sea level rise.

paganel2• 4 years ago

There's no soil erosion that goes 13km inland without an accompanying sea-level rise.

galgot• 4 years ago

Could it be that the Ys city legend in Brittany was this Welsh legend transposed in Brittany, when the Bretons (originally Welsh peoples) migrated there... very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys

Nursie• 4 years ago

And don't forget Lyonesse, a Cornish lost land, with related language and people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse

tombh• 4 years ago

I grew up in this part of the world! Quite a strange juxtaposition seeing my home on the front page of this site.

So maybe I can offer some lesser known interesting context:

Wales is only some 300km west of London, yet I have childhood memories (some 35 years ago) of needing to try to speak Welsh to my elderly (in his 80s) neighbour who struggled with English.

There is a theory that English's use of "do" (so-called "Do-support") comes from the Welsh language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins

The stones for Stonehenge come from the Preseli mountains, a small range of blue-ish hills exactly on the coast where these lost islands are proposed.

There is a Welsh settlement in Argentina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Wladfa

Not strictly Welsh, but the Severn Estuary, which is the calm, funnel of sea between Wales and England, that invites ships into the harbour of Bristol, points exactly towards Newfoundland in North America. This Welsh-English estuary is where John Cabot made the second recorded voyage of a modern European to the New World[1]. Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds, but there was a time when it was the coastline and harbours of the South West British Isles that rang and echoed with the adventures, legends, captains, pirates, spices, gems and foreigners of unimaginable far away lands.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot#Second_voyage

r3trohack3r• 4 years ago

Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds

I have a habit of parking on the top floors of parking garages for the views. A few months back, I was parked on the top floor of PHX at night waiting to pick up a friend. I sat and watched the planes depart and arrive for 45 minutes or so. From my angle, they were quite small and I was able to take in several runways of activity simultaneously. Looking to the left there were constellations of aircraft lining up to approach the runways.

The scale of "Sky Harbor" was lost on me until that moment, watching these aircraft come to port. Some passenger planes, some cargo, all connecting distant lands. It felt like watching a shipyard. And then I realized the awe I felt at the progress of humanity was probably on-par with someone standing in a shipyard circa 1650. And the relative antiquity we feel towards them in 1650 will be felt towards us in 2300. What they had wasn't any more antiquity than what I have - we both sit at the pinnacle of human civilization so far staring forward into the potential.

Not sure where this ramble is going - but thank you for sharing your story and throwing me back to that moment.

ljf3• 4 years ago

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc#:~:text=Madoc%2C%20als....

UberFly2• 4 years ago

The article says the research was based on the Gough Map. Just look at this thing. Quite impressive.

http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/large/ggh1.jpg

calibas• 4 years ago

Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil and several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)

Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible

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