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Natural disasters unleash forces | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
that are, literally, earth-shattering. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:09 | |
Whether it be an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a tidal wave, | 0:00:09 | 0:00:13 | |
each is terrifying. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:16 | |
but fascinating too. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:18 | |
Hollywood disaster movies make for a thrilling spectacle, | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
but what about disaster documentaries? | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
Surely we look to them to provide answers, not just entertainment. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:31 | |
But to do that, programmes need to keep pace | 0:00:31 | 0:00:35 | |
with science that advances every day. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
So, I've searched the archives | 0:00:39 | 0:00:41 | |
of the ground-breaking history series Timewatch | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
and 60 years of BBC documentaries, | 0:00:44 | 0:00:46 | |
to see how film-makers have dealt with disaster, | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
providing an extraordinary insight | 0:00:49 | 0:00:52 | |
into one of the fastest-moving branches of knowledge. | 0:00:52 | 0:00:56 | |
I'll see how rival theories keep emerging | 0:00:56 | 0:01:00 | |
on the destruction of ancient Atlantis... | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
It's normal, as a scientist that you guess, essentially, | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
what might have happened, say, in Atlantis, | 0:01:06 | 0:01:08 | |
based on the evidence at the time. | 0:01:08 | 0:01:10 | |
..how there's still much to learn | 0:01:10 | 0:01:12 | |
about history's most famous volcanic eruption at Pompeii... | 0:01:12 | 0:01:17 | |
Science, if it's healthy, is a constant state of doubt. | 0:01:17 | 0:01:21 | |
..how film-makers explore theories | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
that sometimes sound barely believable. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:28 | |
Was this killer wave of 400 years ago a British tsunami? | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
These films do show that historians and scientists have made | 0:01:39 | 0:01:43 | |
incredible advances in the study of historical disasters. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:47 | |
Best of all, we can share that thrill of discovery | 0:01:47 | 0:01:51 | |
and a new understanding of some of history's greatest calamities. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:55 | |
As an engineer, I'm fascinated to discover how things work. | 0:02:13 | 0:02:19 | |
But, as I've studied the film archive on disasters, | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
I've realised we're still learning how the Earth itself works. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:26 | |
The experts in this field keep turning up | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
fresh evidence and new theories. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
What they thought was true just a few years ago | 0:02:35 | 0:02:38 | |
may no longer seem certain today. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:40 | |
But there's still something in me | 0:02:43 | 0:02:45 | |
that wants to ask what actually happened to cause such and such? | 0:02:45 | 0:02:50 | |
Was it X or was it Y? Surely somebody knows. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:53 | |
For me, searching the film archive offers | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
a unique opportunity to see how theories develop over time. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:06 | |
I know that definite answers will be hard to find. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:12 | |
For instance, this beach I'm on in south Wales was hit | 0:03:13 | 0:03:17 | |
by a giant wave 400 years ago, causing huge loss of life. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:22 | |
Some researchers say it was a massive storm surge. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
Much more controversially, others believe it was a tsunami, | 0:03:28 | 0:03:32 | |
caused by an earthquake out at sea. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:35 | |
I'll come back to that later, | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
but it's just one example of how researchers, | 0:03:37 | 0:03:40 | |
and the film-makers who document their work, | 0:03:40 | 0:03:42 | |
are forever seeking new explanations | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
for some of the greatest calamities to ever strike our planet. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
Since the dawn of time, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:51 | |
we humans have been trying to understand how the Earth works. | 0:03:51 | 0:03:55 | |
Specifically, the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions | 0:03:57 | 0:04:01 | |
which can wipe out whole cities in moments - | 0:04:01 | 0:04:05 | |
events so cataclysmic, they're still often simply called acts of God. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:11 | |
Before we consider the disasters themselves, | 0:04:13 | 0:04:15 | |
we need to look at the science behind them. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
The realisation that the Earth has a constantly moving crust | 0:04:20 | 0:04:24 | |
is really very recent | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
and it's completely changed our understanding of disasters. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:30 | |
This has only really been an accepted theory | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
since as late as the 1960s. | 0:04:32 | 0:04:35 | |
Earthquake science is really quite novel and quite new | 0:04:35 | 0:04:39 | |
and the last 30 years or so have shown incredible developments. | 0:04:39 | 0:04:42 | |
And so, when this film appeared 45 years ago, | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
it was proclaiming nothing less than a revolution. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
Nearly all earthquakes occur at the boundaries | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
between the great plates of the Earth's outer shell. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:56 | |
In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, | 0:04:56 | 0:05:01 | |
the home of many ancient civilisations, | 0:05:01 | 0:05:03 | |
there's an extraordinary jumble of large and small plates. | 0:05:03 | 0:05:06 | |
Dan McKenzie of Cambridge University | 0:05:08 | 0:05:10 | |
is one of the young revolutionaries of the Earth sciences. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:14 | |
He played a pioneering part in first telling | 0:05:14 | 0:05:16 | |
how the first great plates move as rigid units about the globe. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
Most of the worst earthquakes in the Mediterranean occur | 0:05:20 | 0:05:24 | |
because Greece and Turkey are moving really quite rapidly westwards, | 0:05:24 | 0:05:28 | |
at about 5cm a year. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:30 | |
This means they've moved about 100 yards since the time of Socrates. | 0:05:30 | 0:05:34 | |
This pair of scissors and a bobbin show what's happening. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
The bottom of the scissors is Africa and the top is Europe. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:42 | |
Bobbin is Turkey. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:44 | |
As Africa comes towards Europe, Turkey is squeezed out of the way. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:49 | |
In this village, three-quarters of the population perished. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:55 | |
An earthquake struck at 2.15 in the afternoon of 31st August, 1968. | 0:05:55 | 0:06:01 | |
It killed 10,000 villagers and some of the bodies were never found. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:06 | |
When the heavily-built roof of this communal wash house | 0:06:06 | 0:06:10 | |
fell on them, 28 women died. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:12 | |
The energy let loose in this earthquake was equivalent | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
to an H-bomb of several megatons. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
The film shows how this new theory, | 0:06:20 | 0:06:22 | |
that pieces of the Earth's crust collide | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
and grind against each other, | 0:06:25 | 0:06:26 | |
allowed scientists to understand even very recent disasters | 0:06:26 | 0:06:30 | |
in a completely new way. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:32 | |
Right across the world, in California, | 0:06:33 | 0:06:35 | |
the San Fernando earthquake of 1971 awoke old faults | 0:06:35 | 0:06:39 | |
that hadn't moved for thousands of years. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:42 | |
It killed more than 60 people and gave warning | 0:06:42 | 0:06:45 | |
of what more severe earthquakes might do to Californian cities. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:49 | |
Earthquakes are part of a systematic remodelling of the Earth. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:54 | |
That's the doctrine of a new generation of Earth scientists, | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
like Tanya Atwater. | 0:06:57 | 0:06:58 | |
She worked out how movements of the ocean floor have affected the land | 0:06:58 | 0:07:02 | |
and so explain afresh much of the scenery of the western USA. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:05 | |
When I was in school, I was taught that the Earth makes its mountains | 0:07:05 | 0:07:09 | |
by a complicated sort of sinking and bobbing action, | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
first down and then up again. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:14 | |
That doesn't seem to be the case at all. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
Most mountains seem to be made | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
by one piece of the Earth's outer crust | 0:07:18 | 0:07:21 | |
pushing sideways against another. | 0:07:21 | 0:07:22 | |
This is some of the damage from the recent San Fernando earthquake. | 0:07:22 | 0:07:26 | |
The buckling here is just the latest step | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
in the buckling of the Earth that made the mountains behind. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
Here, great plates are grinding. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:35 | |
The coastal strip of California is edging | 0:07:36 | 0:07:38 | |
past the rest of North America. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:40 | |
This is three feet of mountain that was thrown up | 0:07:42 | 0:07:44 | |
in the recent earthquake, just like the sidewalk was. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
It doesn't look like much, but you have to think about this happening | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
over and over again, maybe once a century for thousands of centuries. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:55 | |
If you look at the documentaries in the early '70s, | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
they were still explaining plate tectonics to the audience. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:05 | |
Now, if you look at more recent documentaries, | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
plate tectonics is very broadly understood by the viewing public, | 0:08:11 | 0:08:15 | |
I think, so they're starting from a different point. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
Once you know how recently the nature of the Earth's crust | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
was still a mystery, it's easier to understand | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
how theories are still being revised and refined. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
I'm going to look first at how this rapidly developing knowledge | 0:08:35 | 0:08:38 | |
actually posed problems for film-makers. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:41 | |
I've been looking at a series of films tackling the same subject, | 0:08:41 | 0:08:45 | |
with each of them drawing a different conclusion. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
One of the most enduring, most romantic mysteries of all | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
is the search for the fabled island of Atlantis. | 0:08:56 | 0:09:00 | |
Historians have argued whether the story of a lost civilisation, | 0:09:01 | 0:09:05 | |
first told by the Greek philosopher Plato, around 350 BC, | 0:09:05 | 0:09:09 | |
has a basis in fact, or whether it's merely a legend. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:14 | |
Finally, in 1972, | 0:09:16 | 0:09:18 | |
archaeologists discovered startling new evidence | 0:09:18 | 0:09:21 | |
that Atlantis may have truly existed | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
but was wiped out in a natural disaster. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
This is how Plato had described it. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:30 | |
"In this island of Atlantis, | 0:09:31 | 0:09:33 | |
"there was the fairest and noblest race of men that ever lived. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
"But they fell from grace | 0:09:36 | 0:09:37 | |
"and were punished by the Earth shaker Poseidon. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:40 | |
"And afterwards, there occurred violent earthquakes | 0:09:45 | 0:09:48 | |
"and floods and, in one terrible day and night, | 0:09:48 | 0:09:50 | |
"the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea." | 0:09:50 | 0:09:54 | |
The new evidence suggested | 0:10:03 | 0:10:05 | |
that the disaster struck in the eastern Mediterranean | 0:10:05 | 0:10:08 | |
on an island now crowded with tourists ever year, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
but which, in 1972, was a sleepy backwater - | 0:10:11 | 0:10:15 | |
Santorini, sometimes known as Thera. | 0:10:15 | 0:10:19 | |
A land of grapes and wine, | 0:10:23 | 0:10:24 | |
one of the most enchanting of all the Greek islands of the Aegean, | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
a picturesque, idyllic island on the surface but, underneath, | 0:10:28 | 0:10:32 | |
there lurks a threat of terrible natural violence. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
For Santorini is an area of alarming geological instability. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
These cliffs are the walls of a caldera, | 0:10:41 | 0:10:43 | |
a vast crater that formed when the erupting volcano collapsed, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:47 | |
leaving a gaping hole to be filled by the sea. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:49 | |
It was a Greek philosopher, Plato, | 0:10:51 | 0:10:53 | |
who first wrote of the legend in the fourth century BC. | 0:10:53 | 0:10:56 | |
It told of an ancient island civilisation. | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
They became greedy and were punished by the gods | 0:10:59 | 0:11:03 | |
and their land sank beneath the sea. | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
What the archaeologists had just discovered was an entire city | 0:11:09 | 0:11:13 | |
buried beneath tonnes of volcanic ash. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
And, remarkably, it seemed to match Plato's description | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
of a wealthy, civilised society, | 0:11:20 | 0:11:23 | |
with a taste for artistic expression. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:26 | |
Perhaps the most exciting discoveries are the frescos, | 0:11:28 | 0:11:31 | |
and we arrived at the site | 0:11:31 | 0:11:33 | |
just as completely new wall painting was being uncovered. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
Skin divers and fishermen at work. One goes down with a hook. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:44 | |
One might be collecting sponges. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
And, as the divers pick their way through the coral on the seabed, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:51 | |
on the surface, a convoy of ships is on the move, | 0:11:51 | 0:11:55 | |
led by a 50-oared galley. | 0:11:55 | 0:11:57 | |
What's more, the eruption on Santorini also appeared | 0:12:01 | 0:12:04 | |
to neatly solve another long-standing historical mystery. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:08 | |
Experts already knew that, at almost the same time, | 0:12:11 | 0:12:15 | |
sudden disaster had overcome the island of Crete, | 0:12:15 | 0:12:18 | |
60 miles to the south. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:20 | |
The wealthy and highly developed civilisation there, | 0:12:20 | 0:12:24 | |
the Minoan kingdom, disappeared almost overnight, | 0:12:24 | 0:12:27 | |
and for no obvious reason. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
But, armed with their new knowledge of the Earth sciences, | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
archaeologists imagined that the volcano on Santorini | 0:12:34 | 0:12:38 | |
had sent out a tidal wave big enough | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
to cause wholesale destruction on Crete. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
Tidal waves of appalling violence, perhaps some 600 feet high, | 0:12:44 | 0:12:49 | |
came raging in over the exposed northern coasts of Crete. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
Buildings had been dragged to the ground, as the waves receded. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
These waves had been created | 0:12:57 | 0:12:59 | |
by the collapse of the volcano in Santorini, | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
some 60 miles away to the north. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:04 | |
This was a ground-breaking piece of historical detective work. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:09 | |
Atlantis had been found and the mystery of the Minoans solved. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:14 | |
Case closed. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:16 | |
But in less than ten years, new evidence emerged, | 0:13:17 | 0:13:20 | |
forcing the very same team of film-makers | 0:13:20 | 0:13:23 | |
to backtrack on the tsunami theory. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:25 | |
On islands much closer than Crete, especially the island of Melos, | 0:13:27 | 0:13:32 | |
archaeologists found no evidence of a giant tidal wave. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:36 | |
We saw no evidence at all | 0:13:38 | 0:13:40 | |
of these great waves, tidal waves, tsunamis, | 0:13:40 | 0:13:42 | |
whatever you want to call them, in Melos. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
If there were great tsunamis which were rushing across the ocean | 0:13:46 | 0:13:49 | |
and going to flatten the palaces of Crete, | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
we would have expected to find traces of that also in Melos. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:55 | |
I have the feeling, therefore, | 0:13:57 | 0:13:59 | |
that it wasn't as disastrous in the Aegean, | 0:13:59 | 0:14:01 | |
as a whole, as is sometimes thought. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:03 | |
But, if it wasn't a tsunami, | 0:14:06 | 0:14:08 | |
what then caused the destruction of the Minoan civilisation on Crete? | 0:14:08 | 0:14:11 | |
The film shows how archaeologists revisited all the clues, | 0:14:15 | 0:14:20 | |
just like detectives reopening an old case. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:23 | |
In particular, they looked again | 0:14:24 | 0:14:26 | |
at the wall paintings they'd uncovered | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
and now, built a theory that the Minoans were wiped out | 0:14:28 | 0:14:32 | |
by invaders from the Greek mainland. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
It's a fascinating insight into the way that archaeologists | 0:14:35 | 0:14:38 | |
necessarily use one piece of a jigsaw to imagine the whole picture. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:43 | |
With the tidal wave theory crushed, | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
the chief archaeologist on Santorini had to come up with a new narrative | 0:14:46 | 0:14:50 | |
to explain those wall paintings of people in the sea. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:54 | |
He first interpreted the figures in the water | 0:14:54 | 0:14:57 | |
as underwater fishermen or sponge divers | 0:14:57 | 0:15:01 | |
but later, he recognised them to be dead bodies, | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
sinking to the bottom of the sea, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:06 | |
casualties of some kind of naval engagement | 0:15:06 | 0:15:09 | |
that seems to be taking place on the surface above them. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:12 | |
The figures in the water may yet turn out to be | 0:15:14 | 0:15:17 | |
evidence in favour of the invasion thesis. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:19 | |
In the space of less than ten years, one important theory had emerged, | 0:15:23 | 0:15:28 | |
been shot down and then replaced by another. | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
It's very easy to look back and say they got it all wrong, | 0:15:33 | 0:15:37 | |
but isn't this experimental approach | 0:15:37 | 0:15:39 | |
what archaeology, science too, is all about - | 0:15:39 | 0:15:43 | |
providing new answers to old questions | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
with evidence that's constantly emerging? | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
Science, if it's healthy, is a constant state of doubt. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:58 | |
There are phrases like, "Scientists believe that..." - | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
a phrase I hate because it doesn't represent | 0:16:02 | 0:16:05 | |
this constant disagreement that has to go on in science or else it dies. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:11 | |
And, of course, that wasn't the end of it. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:16 | |
Discovering Atlantis is pretty much the Holy Grail | 0:16:18 | 0:16:21 | |
for archaeologists and a perennial subject for TV documentaries. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:25 | |
In 2002, film-makers once again reported that it HAD been found. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:33 | |
But in a different part of Greece altogether. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:35 | |
A separate team of archaeologists, digging on the Greek mainland, | 0:16:35 | 0:16:40 | |
declared they'd found Atlantis... | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
..and that it had been destroyed by a quite different natural disaster. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:49 | |
This is the coast of Greece on the Corinthian Gulf, | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
150km west of Athens. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
It is one of the most active earthquake regions in the world. | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
According to old Roman texts, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:02 | |
there was once a great Ancient Greek city here, called Helike. | 0:17:02 | 0:17:08 | |
2,500 years ago, Helike was a thriving metropolis. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
Over 5,000 people lived and worked within its walls | 0:17:19 | 0:17:23 | |
and pilgrims thronged to its temple of Poseidon. | 0:17:23 | 0:17:26 | |
But on one cold winter's night, in 373 BC, | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
the god of earthquakes and the sea turned on his own people. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:38 | |
The ancient sources said the earthquake struck at night | 0:17:45 | 0:17:47 | |
when most people were caught in their houses. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
A massive tidal wave or tsunami or sea wave came in... | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
..and swept away all survivors. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
Helike and all of its people were swept to the bottom of the sea, | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
never to be seen again. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
Just a few short years after the disaster, | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
the Greek writer Plato created the story of Atlantis. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:27 | |
The archaeologists had been toiling here for 15 years, | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
uncovering pottery and other artefacts, | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
when they came upon structures | 0:18:42 | 0:18:44 | |
which seemed to show signs of damage by tidal wave. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:47 | |
Finally, in the walls below them, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
was possible evidence of the disaster itself. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
There were signs some huge force had struck the building. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:58 | |
This wall has been knocked down toward the sea. | 0:18:59 | 0:19:01 | |
That has the kind of pattern that you see when you have the backwash | 0:19:04 | 0:19:07 | |
from the enormous wave going back to the sea... | 0:19:07 | 0:19:10 | |
..and knocking them down in the direction of the sea. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
So, it seems that, after 15 long years of searching, | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
their team may have succeeded | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
where so many other archaeologists have failed. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:25 | |
They believe these walls are just the first glimpses | 0:19:27 | 0:19:30 | |
of the buildings that must lie in the ground around them. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
Beyond them, towards the hills, should lie the rest of the city, | 0:19:34 | 0:19:38 | |
waiting to be uncovered. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:40 | |
Now it seems the city whose destruction inspired | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
the legend of Atlantis may finally have been found. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:49 | |
So, was that the end of the quest for Atlantis? | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
It's a mystery that just won't die. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
When Timewatch joined the search for Atlantis a decade later, | 0:20:05 | 0:20:10 | |
the pendulum had swung right back to where it was in 1972. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:15 | |
Historian Bettany Hughes went hunting for fresh evidence, | 0:20:16 | 0:20:21 | |
homing in, once again, on the island of Santorini. | 0:20:21 | 0:20:25 | |
Atlantis hunting is a fraught exercise | 0:20:27 | 0:20:30 | |
but, precisely because it has generated so many wild theories, | 0:20:30 | 0:20:34 | |
there's even more reason to try to sift the fact from the fiction. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:40 | |
Fresh scientific evidence buttresses the idea that Plato's story | 0:20:42 | 0:20:46 | |
was inspired by a real island and a real ancient civilisation | 0:20:46 | 0:20:50 | |
that was destroyed by a real natural disaster... | 0:20:50 | 0:20:55 | |
..an eruption on a scale the ancient world had never experienced before. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:03 | |
This was an eruption that shook much of the planet. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:12 | |
Ash was transported as far north as the Black Sea, | 0:21:12 | 0:21:15 | |
as far east as central Turkey and as far south as the Nile Delta. | 0:21:15 | 0:21:19 | |
Global temperatures dipped, stunting plant growth, even in Ireland. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:24 | |
The early documentaries show a completely different picture | 0:21:30 | 0:21:33 | |
from the modern ones, due to this advancement of science. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:36 | |
New technologies, like satellite imagery, that we can now study, | 0:21:38 | 0:21:42 | |
that give us a better global picture of what's happening, | 0:21:42 | 0:21:45 | |
GPS, which records the relative movements on two sides of a fault | 0:21:45 | 0:21:49 | |
before, during, after an earthquake. | 0:21:49 | 0:21:51 | |
All of this instrumentation is providing us new data | 0:21:51 | 0:21:54 | |
with which to study these natural events. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:57 | |
For these film-makers, Santorini also seemed to fit perfectly | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
with the description which Plato had provided. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:06 | |
The first thing that strikes you is its really odd topography. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:14 | |
The land just juts straight out of the sea | 0:22:16 | 0:22:19 | |
and then you get these small islands, ringed by water, | 0:22:19 | 0:22:22 | |
which are then, in turn, cradled | 0:22:22 | 0:22:24 | |
by that massive semicircle of land up there. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:26 | |
Now, just listen to what Plato has to say about his Atlantis. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
"There were circular belts of sea and land enclosing one another, | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
"some greater, some smaller." | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
Of course, that, in itself, doesn't prove anything. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:46 | |
There could be loads of locations all round the world | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
that match this description. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:50 | |
But, nonetheless, this account | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
and that landscape are really remarkably similar. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
Bettany's team had revived the 1972 theory | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
that a massive tsunami had swept south from Santorini, | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
smashing into the island of Crete. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
Evidence of the tsunami had now turned up on Crete itself. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:25 | |
Archaeologist Sandy MacGillivray and tsunami expert, Costas Synolakis, | 0:23:26 | 0:23:30 | |
are investigating the scale of the tsunamis | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
by mapping pumice on Crete's northern coastline. | 0:23:33 | 0:23:37 | |
Here's some. Here's a piece there. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
That's so light, isn't it? Mm-hmm. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:44 | |
Cos it must have floated here, so... It's exactly what we like. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:48 | |
I mean, flotsam that comes out gives us an idea | 0:23:48 | 0:23:51 | |
of how high the wave reached. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:54 | |
So, the tsunami would have carried this up here to this headland. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
At least to this point. | 0:23:57 | 0:23:58 | |
It could have carried it further up | 0:23:58 | 0:24:00 | |
and then it could have washed downriver | 0:24:00 | 0:24:02 | |
with the rain, with floods. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
But this gives us, helps us bracket the size of the wave right offshore. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:08 | |
Costas has developed a computer simulation | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
of how the tsunamis would have travelled. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
This is the initial wave. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:18 | |
We follow it all the way to Crete. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:22 | |
The first wave causes the shoreline to retreat, to move offshore. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
We are less than an hour from the eruption | 0:24:26 | 0:24:28 | |
and the red on the south side of Crete | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
and the eastern Peloponnese are experiencing the big wave. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:36 | |
What do you think, Sandy, that says about what happened to Crete, | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
because most people live along the coast, don't they? I think so. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:43 | |
There was the city of Knossos which is inland | 0:24:43 | 0:24:45 | |
but, otherwise it's very much open coastline | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
and so, the death toll would have been staggering. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:52 | |
The hard evidence shows us | 0:24:54 | 0:24:56 | |
that here, there was a sophisticated trading civilisation | 0:24:56 | 0:25:00 | |
that flourished and was then swallowed by the sea, | 0:25:00 | 0:25:04 | |
ravaged by a disaster of legendary proportions. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
Surely this is the root of Plato's Atlantis legend? | 0:25:10 | 0:25:15 | |
So, it's clear that theories come and go. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
I suspect that's not the last we've heard of Atlantis. | 0:25:24 | 0:25:27 | |
Certainly, for the moment at least, | 0:25:30 | 0:25:32 | |
the evidence seems to favour Santorini | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
as the true location for Plato's Atlantis. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
And it's brought home to me, | 0:25:39 | 0:25:41 | |
just how new much of the underlying science really is. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:46 | |
Tsunamis, in particular, are very poorly understood. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:49 | |
I don't think a lot of people realise | 0:25:51 | 0:25:53 | |
but, until the Indian Ocean tsunami, in 2004, | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
we didn't even know what a tsunami wave looked like. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:58 | |
It was only due to the complete chance of there being a vessel, | 0:25:58 | 0:26:02 | |
measuring the depth of water offshore of Thailand | 0:26:02 | 0:26:04 | |
when the tsunami passed under it, that we actually have a trace | 0:26:04 | 0:26:08 | |
of what a tsunami wave looks like, and that's 2004. | 0:26:08 | 0:26:13 | |
I'm going to look now at how film-makers have tried to keep pace | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
with another branch of the Earth sciences. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
Just as with tsunamis, our understanding of volcanoes | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
has massively increased in the last 40 years. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
In 1972, film-makers explored | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
some of the brand-new discoveries in volcanology. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
EXPLOSION | 0:26:41 | 0:26:44 | |
A volcano in eruption is undoubtedly the finest pyrotechnic display | 0:26:44 | 0:26:48 | |
that man can ever see. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:51 | |
These falls are twice the height of Niagara. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:54 | |
And the fire fountain rises to almost 1,000 feet. | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
Volcanoes can be docile or violent. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:03 | |
In fact, volcanoes can vary enormously. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
Some lava flows like water, some is thicker than treacle. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
Volcanoes may have a far greater effect on the formation of the globe | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
than the volcanologists at first suspected. | 0:27:19 | 0:27:22 | |
Starting at the South Pacific, | 0:27:22 | 0:27:23 | |
volcanoes spread right through Indonesia | 0:27:23 | 0:27:25 | |
and up the island chain to Japan, Siberia and Alaska, | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
down the west coast of America, with a loop round the Caribbean, | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
though Mexico, Peru and Chile. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
It's not a random distribution. There are patterns. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:39 | |
The structure of the Earth's crust is a series of rigid plates. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
Volcanoes help determine the plate boundaries. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:46 | |
The film advances the then novel theory | 0:27:51 | 0:27:54 | |
that all the land we now live on | 0:27:54 | 0:27:56 | |
was at one time spewed from the mouth of an erupting volcano. | 0:27:56 | 0:28:00 | |
The best information which we have available at the present time | 0:28:03 | 0:28:06 | |
suggests that all the world's volcanoes, between them, | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
are currently producing about three cubic kilometres | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
of new material per year. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:15 | |
At this rate, sustained through the course of geological time, | 0:28:16 | 0:28:20 | |
the Earth's volcanoes would be capable of building up | 0:28:20 | 0:28:22 | |
the whole of the continental crust. | 0:28:22 | 0:28:25 | |
I think it's possible that the continental crust is, indeed, | 0:28:25 | 0:28:29 | |
due to four and a half thousand million years of volcanism. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
This new understanding of volcanoes helped historians | 0:28:36 | 0:28:39 | |
to better explain huge historic disasters, | 0:28:39 | 0:28:42 | |
in particular the incredible story of Pompeii. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:47 | |
This city in southern Italy, along with its neighbouring Herculaneum, | 0:28:49 | 0:28:53 | |
was destroyed by a vast eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:59 | |
EXPLOSIONS | 0:29:04 | 0:29:08 | |
The way that Pompeii citizens, who perished in the disaster, | 0:29:08 | 0:29:12 | |
seem frozen in time has captured our imaginations. | 0:29:12 | 0:29:16 | |
Their body outlines, preserved in the ashes, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:20 | |
give a real sense of their final moments. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:23 | |
More than 50 years ago, in 1966, | 0:29:27 | 0:29:30 | |
presenter Robert Erskine introduced | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
this remarkable story to the TV audience. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
Thousands of the townsfolk died, poisonous by the sulphurous fumes, | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
in the basements of the houses and in the streets, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
because they couldn't make up their minds what to do. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
At the first cataclysmic explosion, | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
the mountain split, split open, | 0:29:51 | 0:29:54 | |
and it spewed its hideous innards all the way down this gulley, | 0:29:54 | 0:29:58 | |
straight towards the town. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:00 | |
Well, the inhabitants took one look and ran. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
Down these very streets, they fled in terror, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
away from the mountain, leaving everything behind them, | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
doors and houses open, the wine bars precipitantly deserted, | 0:30:12 | 0:30:16 | |
everything left where it was dropped in the terror of the moment. | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
A blind panic flight, it must have been. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:21 | |
By the early '70s, | 0:30:27 | 0:30:29 | |
our new understanding of Earth science would deepen this knowledge. | 0:30:29 | 0:30:32 | |
So, by 1974, film-makers could give | 0:30:34 | 0:30:38 | |
a much more detailed account of the disaster. | 0:30:38 | 0:30:40 | |
On Mount Vesuvius, broad sheets of fire | 0:30:42 | 0:30:44 | |
and leaping flames blazed at several points. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
Ashes were already falling. | 0:30:48 | 0:30:51 | |
The buildings were now shaking with violent shocks. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:53 | |
Outside, on the other hand, | 0:30:53 | 0:30:55 | |
there was the danger of falling pumice stones. | 0:30:55 | 0:30:58 | |
We now know what actually happened. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
A violent blast of gas shot a huge cloud of ash and pumice | 0:31:04 | 0:31:07 | |
miles into the air. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:09 | |
Down fell a rain of lapilli, pieces of pumice, | 0:31:09 | 0:31:11 | |
which buried the city to a depth of about ten feet. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
Some people fled, but many who sheltered in the houses | 0:31:14 | 0:31:18 | |
were killed by buildings crumbling under the weight. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
Others were trapped and died. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:22 | |
Survivors emerged into the open. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:27 | |
It was then that a hurricane of scorching ash | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
swept down the mountain. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:32 | |
Those in flight, their lungs seared by the red-hot lava particles, | 0:31:35 | 0:31:38 | |
collapsed in their tracks. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:40 | |
About 2,000 bodies have been found so far, one-tenth of the population. | 0:31:40 | 0:31:46 | |
The last minor eruption of Vesuvius was in 1944. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:52 | |
For 30 years, the volcano has been silent, dangerously silent. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:58 | |
But for how long? | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
Vesuvius today looks like a volcano. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
Although you can climb to the top, no-one can be in much doubt | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
of the explosive forces not very far below the surface. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:17 | |
Vesuvius is a particularly dangerous volcano, capable of great violence. | 0:32:19 | 0:32:25 | |
Always the cities of the Bay of Naples must live in fear. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
No-one can be sure when the mountain will split apart again. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:33 | |
And the learning process still continues, | 0:32:37 | 0:32:40 | |
fed by archaeology on one hand, volcanology on the other. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:45 | |
We have a particular volcanic eruption - Vesuvius, AD 79. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:50 | |
Our understanding of that is developing in two ways. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:55 | |
Firstly, more excavations are being done around Vesuvius. | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
But the other way is that we experience | 0:32:59 | 0:33:03 | |
other eruptions of similar types. | 0:33:03 | 0:33:06 | |
Therefore, you realise you can use the geophysical data, | 0:33:08 | 0:33:12 | |
the observational data, and so on, | 0:33:12 | 0:33:15 | |
of these different eruptions to understand AD 79. | 0:33:15 | 0:33:20 | |
It's clear how our understanding has increased | 0:33:23 | 0:33:25 | |
when you look at a much more recent film, | 0:33:25 | 0:33:28 | |
which adopted a rigorously forensic approach to the disaster. | 0:33:28 | 0:33:32 | |
In the early 1980s, a remarkable discovery was made | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
at Herculaneum, which lies only 7km from Vesuvius, closer than Pompeii. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:42 | |
300 skeletons were discovered, all victims of the volcanic eruption. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:48 | |
But, to work out exactly what killed them, scientists needed to study | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
another eruption that happened almost 2,000 years later. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:59 | |
The results appeared in a film, presented by Roman history scholar | 0:34:01 | 0:34:05 | |
and one-time Apprentice panellist Margaret Mountford. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
What force was hot enough to reduce these poor people | 0:34:13 | 0:34:16 | |
to a pile of scorched bones? | 0:34:16 | 0:34:18 | |
We need to look at a volcano that erupted in North America | 0:34:21 | 0:34:23 | |
in the 1980s. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:25 | |
Mount St Helens National Park has | 0:34:31 | 0:34:33 | |
some of the most breathtaking scenery in the USA. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
But on Sunday, May 18th, 1980, this peaceful world was transformed | 0:34:38 | 0:34:44 | |
when the Mount St Helens volcano erupted. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
EXPLOSIONS | 0:34:50 | 0:34:54 | |
Volcanologists had seen eruptions before, | 0:34:58 | 0:35:01 | |
but this was the first time | 0:35:01 | 0:35:03 | |
they had managed to capture on film a little-known phenomenon. | 0:35:03 | 0:35:06 | |
The whole north face of Mount St Helens collapses. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
As it does, it releases a searing-hot avalanche | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
of gas and dust that explodes down the sides of the mountain. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:22 | |
This is called a pyroclastic current. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
The turbulent wave of gas measured 700 degrees Celsius | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
and travelled at nearly 500km an hour. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:37 | |
Can you explain what a pyroclastic current is? | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
A pyroclastic current is an avalanche | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
of searing-hot gas, ash and rock | 0:35:45 | 0:35:48 | |
that travels down the slopes of a volcano | 0:35:48 | 0:35:50 | |
at hundreds of kilometres an hour. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:53 | |
It's impossible to outrun and absolutely deadly. | 0:35:53 | 0:35:56 | |
When I think of an eruption, I think of streams of lava | 0:35:56 | 0:35:59 | |
coming down a mountain. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
Well, the style of eruption - whether a volcano will erupt lava | 0:36:01 | 0:36:05 | |
or if it will erupt explosively - | 0:36:05 | 0:36:08 | |
is primarily a function of how much gas is in the magma. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:12 | |
If there is no gas in the magma, | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
then the magma will erupt as a lava flow or a lava dome. | 0:36:14 | 0:36:18 | |
And that is the actual magma, | 0:36:18 | 0:36:19 | |
the liquefied rock that's coming out as lava. Exactly. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:23 | |
And, in an explosive eruption, | 0:36:23 | 0:36:24 | |
the difference is the magma has gas bubbles | 0:36:24 | 0:36:27 | |
and as the gas in the magma makes its way to the surface, | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
the gas bubbles get bigger and bigger and bigger, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:33 | |
to the point where, when the volcano erupts, | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
the gases expand very quickly | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
and it rips the magma apart into very tiny pieces, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
which are your ash and your pumice. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:43 | |
From what scientists witnessed at Mount St Helens, | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
and data gathered from other volcanic eruptions, | 0:36:48 | 0:36:51 | |
it's now possible to piece together | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
exactly what happened when Vesuvius erupted. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:56 | |
EXPLOSION | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
12 hours after the initial eruption, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
the column above Vesuvius stretched nearly 32km high. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:07 | |
But under its own weight, it collapsed. | 0:37:09 | 0:37:12 | |
A pyroclastic current surged down the sides of the volcano | 0:37:15 | 0:37:18 | |
at speeds up 300km an hour. | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
Temperatures inside the explosive blast were over 500 degrees Celsius. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
The wave of searing-hot gas and ash took less than five minutes | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
to strike Herculaneum 7km away. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:46 | |
The intense heat surge killed them instantly. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:01 | |
It vaporised their flesh. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:08 | |
And that is why all that remained | 0:38:16 | 0:38:18 | |
were blackened skeletons and cracked skulls. | 0:38:18 | 0:38:22 | |
This new insight into volcanoes gives historians a toolkit | 0:38:26 | 0:38:31 | |
with which to investigate previously unexplained events from the past. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:36 | |
We get new data all the time. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:41 | |
We didn't have a concept of the pyroclastic flow | 0:38:41 | 0:38:44 | |
and what pyroclastic flows did to people. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:47 | |
So, this constant drawing of information from other areas, | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
and comparisons and analogies, | 0:38:50 | 0:38:52 | |
means that the science is changing all the time. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:55 | |
The depth of knowledge which now exists | 0:38:56 | 0:38:59 | |
about the Vesuvius eruption shows | 0:38:59 | 0:39:01 | |
that with historians, scientists and film-makers working together, | 0:39:01 | 0:39:06 | |
it is possible to take an old mystery | 0:39:06 | 0:39:09 | |
and supply a definitive answer. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:11 | |
Bur my trawl through the film archive shows there are still areas | 0:39:12 | 0:39:16 | |
where that's not at all true. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:18 | |
One of the deadliest disasters ever to strike the planet | 0:39:18 | 0:39:22 | |
still has no known cause. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:24 | |
Or at least no cause which experts can agree on. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:29 | |
It was an epidemic which killed tens of millions of people | 0:39:31 | 0:39:35 | |
and could, some experts fear, reappear today. | 0:39:35 | 0:39:39 | |
650 years ago, the so-called Black Death | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
is thought to have wiped out | 0:39:43 | 0:39:45 | |
something close to a third of Europe's population. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
But, as Timewatch reported in 1984, | 0:39:49 | 0:39:53 | |
the epidemic raises maybe the biggest question in medical history. | 0:39:53 | 0:39:58 | |
The cause of that holocaust, historians believe, was plague - | 0:40:00 | 0:40:03 | |
more specifically, bubonic and pneumonic plague. | 0:40:03 | 0:40:07 | |
New biological research, however, is coming to a different conclusion. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:11 | |
The time-honoured theory was that bubonic plague had been spread | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
by black rats. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
The fleas that live on the rats, but also feed on humans, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:25 | |
were thought to be the way the disease was transmitted. | 0:40:25 | 0:40:28 | |
But did this theory add up, in the light of new evidence? | 0:40:28 | 0:40:32 | |
The Black Death first arrived in Britain on the Dorset coast. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:39 | |
By the end of 1348, it had most of southern England in its grip. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:44 | |
Six months later, it had spread through Wales, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:47 | |
the Midlands and East Anglia. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:49 | |
By the end of 1349, it had reached the Scottish Highlands | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
and the North of Ireland. | 0:40:52 | 0:40:54 | |
It moved across the country at about a mile a day | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
or even a little more than that, depending whose account you follow. | 0:40:56 | 0:41:00 | |
Now, this just doesn't fit in with what we know of plague today. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:03 | |
The winter of 1348 to '49 was unusually cold. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:08 | |
But bubonic plague does not appear to thrive in low temperatures. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:12 | |
The black rat is an animal | 0:41:12 | 0:41:14 | |
that likes the warmth. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:15 | |
It comes from India, basically, in that region. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:18 | |
The flea is very temperature dependent. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
It only breeds when the temperature gets | 0:41:23 | 0:41:25 | |
between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit and when the humidity is right. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:30 | |
According to Dr Twigg, there just weren't enough rats and fleas | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
to spread bubonic plague across Britain so rapidly | 0:41:37 | 0:41:40 | |
and with such fearful loss of life. | 0:41:40 | 0:41:42 | |
But if it wasn't bubonic plague, what was it? | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
One disease that fits the bill rather well would be anthrax. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
Unlike bubonic plague, it can spread from person to person. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:56 | |
It's found, to a great extent, | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
in domesticated animals - cattle and sheep. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
But, in a human being, when the spore gets into the body, | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
haemorrhages occur. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:08 | |
The body oozes dark blood from all the bodily orifices. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:14 | |
The fact that anthrax, rather than bubonic plague, | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
might have been the culprit shows, perhaps, | 0:42:20 | 0:42:22 | |
how little we really know about this huge episode in history... | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
..and how difficult it is for film-makers | 0:42:28 | 0:42:31 | |
to offer a definitive account, | 0:42:31 | 0:42:34 | |
with research constantly being updated. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
When Timewatch returned to the question in 2004, | 0:42:37 | 0:42:41 | |
yet another possible candidate | 0:42:41 | 0:42:43 | |
for the killer disease had entered the frame. | 0:42:43 | 0:42:45 | |
The biologist is convinced he's found the answer | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
to the mystery of the Black Death. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
Historians have spent a lot of time | 0:42:52 | 0:42:54 | |
interpreting what went on, | 0:42:54 | 0:42:57 | |
in terms of rats and fleas, which is incorrect | 0:42:57 | 0:43:01 | |
and I think we need the record straightened out. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:03 | |
Professor Duncan's analysis is controversial | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
but he's willing to speculate on the actual identity of the killer | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
which terrorised Europe for over 300 years. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:16 | |
His guess is based on symptoms | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
mentioned in some of the 14th-century accounts. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
"Sudden fever, spitting blood and saliva | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
"and no-one who spat blood survived it." | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
"Brought on by an affliction of the head of vomiting blood." | 0:43:29 | 0:43:33 | |
"The accompanying putrefaction of humours | 0:43:33 | 0:43:37 | |
"caused the victim to cough up blood." | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
Could these be medieval descriptions | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
of someone dying of internal haemorrhaging? | 0:43:45 | 0:43:48 | |
From the symptoms, it has got features in common with Ebola. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
Ebola is one of the deadliest diseases on Earth. | 0:43:57 | 0:44:01 | |
It's caused by a tiny threadlike virus, | 0:44:01 | 0:44:04 | |
which was first isolated 30 years ago in Africa. | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
It causes a wide range of symptoms - fever, coughing up blood | 0:44:09 | 0:44:14 | |
and, occasionally, lumps under the skin. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
The tragedy that was played out across medieval Europe | 0:44:20 | 0:44:23 | |
no longer seems to be easily explained | 0:44:23 | 0:44:25 | |
as an epidemic of bubonic plague, spread by fleas. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:29 | |
We are in the uneasy position of not knowing the cause | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
of the most deadly epidemic ever to strike humanity. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
And until we know, we can't be sure we could stop it happening again. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:42 | |
So, now two possible new diagnoses. | 0:44:49 | 0:44:51 | |
One of this country's leading authorities on epidemics | 0:44:53 | 0:44:56 | |
believes the Black Death could even have been a series of diseases, | 0:44:56 | 0:45:01 | |
striking around the same time. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:04 | |
I don't place all that much reliance on anyone, myself included, | 0:45:04 | 0:45:07 | |
coming up and saying, "This is the answer. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:10 | |
"It's not the plague bacillus, it's the anthrax bacillus | 0:45:10 | 0:45:13 | |
"or it's Ebola, or it's this or it's that or it's something else." | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
It's bad enough to get things diagnosed today, and I mean today. | 0:45:16 | 0:45:20 | |
Imagine what it's like 800 years ago. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:22 | |
I suspect, myself, there were deaths of all kinds of things, | 0:45:24 | 0:45:27 | |
all kinds of things, | 0:45:27 | 0:45:29 | |
and it's too easy to throw them all into the bubonic plague pot. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:33 | |
That's why I'm sceptical about it. | 0:45:33 | 0:45:35 | |
It would be wrong to be too harsh about these conflicting diagnoses. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:43 | |
After all, the second opinion is a long-established tradition. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
But it does serve as a warning | 0:45:48 | 0:45:51 | |
about looking for certainty where it simply may not exist. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:55 | |
After studying these films, I think one of the reasons | 0:45:56 | 0:45:59 | |
why disaster documentaries are so fascinating | 0:45:59 | 0:46:02 | |
is that they make you wonder, "Am I safe? Could it ever happen here?" | 0:46:02 | 0:46:08 | |
Could a lovely beach like this, Dunraven Bay in south Wales, | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
really be the location for a huge natural disaster? | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
Timewatch revealed that's not as farfetched as it sounds. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:24 | |
400 years ago, the entire coastline of the Bristol Channel | 0:46:27 | 0:46:31 | |
was engulfed by an enormous flood. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
The question is, what caused it? | 0:46:35 | 0:46:37 | |
On 20th January, 1607, a wall of water up to ten metres high | 0:46:41 | 0:46:47 | |
rushed over the low-lying sea defences. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:50 | |
Travelling at 30mph, the killer wave bore down | 0:46:58 | 0:47:01 | |
on the villages of Somerset and Monmouthshire. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:04 | |
It came without warning and left 2,000 dead in its wake. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:20 | |
Yet, for centuries, | 0:47:21 | 0:47:22 | |
this apocalyptic flood has been forgotten, | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
and only now are scientists piecing together the evidence left behind. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:29 | |
Was it just a huge storm | 0:47:30 | 0:47:33 | |
or was the killer wave of 1607 in fact a British tsunami? | 0:47:33 | 0:47:38 | |
It was a very timely question when this film appeared in 2005. | 0:47:43 | 0:47:48 | |
The terrible Boxing Day tsunami off Indonesia, | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
with a quarter of a million people dead, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:54 | |
was still fresh in everyone's mind. | 0:47:54 | 0:47:57 | |
The film looks at new research, | 0:48:03 | 0:48:05 | |
suggesting the flood had many of the characteristics of a tsunami, | 0:48:05 | 0:48:09 | |
in particular, the way the rocks are laid out on this beach. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:14 | |
At Dunraven Bay in south Wales, | 0:48:17 | 0:48:19 | |
hundreds of boulders lie at the foot of the cliffs. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
Some have obviously just dropped off the face, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
but others are less easy to explain. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:28 | |
This particular boulder, I'm pretty sure, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:31 | |
has been moved off the beach. | 0:48:31 | 0:48:33 | |
It's got some fossils in it which you don't normally associate | 0:48:33 | 0:48:36 | |
with the older limestones | 0:48:36 | 0:48:38 | |
which you find on the cliffs here. | 0:48:38 | 0:48:39 | |
So, it looks like this quite big boulder | 0:48:39 | 0:48:41 | |
has come from over there on the beach. | 0:48:41 | 0:48:44 | |
The force of water needed to move seven-tonne boulders | 0:48:45 | 0:48:48 | |
could easily be produced by a tsunami. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
The way the boulders are lying gives Simon another clue. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:55 | |
That's 270 degrees west. | 0:48:56 | 0:48:59 | |
Certainly storms can move the odd boulder | 0:48:59 | 0:49:01 | |
and can fling boulders up onto the top of cliffs | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
but, given that we've got so many boulders in a train, | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
what we call a boulder train, | 0:49:06 | 0:49:08 | |
and they're all pointing back in the same direction, | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
that suggests to us a constant flow over time. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:15 | |
It would only have taken a five-metre tsunami wave | 0:49:17 | 0:49:20 | |
to shift these boulders. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:21 | |
For a storm to do the same thing, they calculate it would have taken | 0:49:21 | 0:49:26 | |
a wave at least 20 metres high, over 60 feet. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:29 | |
Yet the very idea of a tsunami laying waste to the Bristol Channel | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
goes against every assumption we have | 0:49:34 | 0:49:36 | |
about Britain being geologically safe. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:39 | |
The big surprise is that the seabed off the southwest tip of Ireland | 0:49:40 | 0:49:45 | |
is the location of an ancient but massive faultline. | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
On 8th February, 1980, sensors recorded an earthquake | 0:49:50 | 0:49:54 | |
from exactly this area, 4.5 on the Richter scale, | 0:49:54 | 0:49:59 | |
violent enough to give fresh impetus to the tsunami theory. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:03 | |
I think I've got the dark layer here. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
I really like that style of film-making. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
I think that's quite a change | 0:50:12 | 0:50:14 | |
from something of the 1970s, | 0:50:14 | 0:50:15 | |
the way that the evidence is presented. | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
Quite thin here. It's coming to about ten centimetres. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:21 | |
The dilemma scientists actually have themselves about the evidence | 0:50:21 | 0:50:25 | |
which, of course, has a great deal of uncertainty about it. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:28 | |
The film-makers are careful to say that much more evidence is needed | 0:50:28 | 0:50:33 | |
before the theory is widely accepted. | 0:50:33 | 0:50:35 | |
But the thought of an undersea earthquake zone, | 0:50:37 | 0:50:40 | |
just a short distance off the British coast, | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
is an intriguing hypothesis and a scary one, too. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:47 | |
The last film I'm going to look at is especially chilling | 0:50:49 | 0:50:52 | |
because it assembles compelling evidence | 0:50:52 | 0:50:54 | |
for disaster that's yet to happen. | 0:50:54 | 0:50:57 | |
This is the story | 0:51:05 | 0:51:06 | |
of how the greatest natural disaster | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
in human history might one day unfold. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:12 | |
The biggest wave ever seen... | 0:51:14 | 0:51:16 | |
..threatening death and devastation | 0:51:17 | 0:51:20 | |
on an unprecedented scale. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:22 | |
The power of this film lies in the fact | 0:51:29 | 0:51:31 | |
that it's based on a genuine scientific hypothesis, | 0:51:31 | 0:51:35 | |
yet it uses all the visual tricks | 0:51:35 | 0:51:38 | |
of the classic disaster movie. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:40 | |
The film reports a study of a volcano in the Canary Islands. | 0:51:41 | 0:51:44 | |
Some scientists fear that an eruption | 0:51:46 | 0:51:48 | |
would cause the volcano to crumble, producing a huge landslide. | 0:51:48 | 0:51:53 | |
That, in turn, | 0:51:53 | 0:51:55 | |
could displace enough water to trigger a mega tsunami. | 0:51:55 | 0:52:00 | |
The film goes on to imagine the terrible consequences | 0:52:01 | 0:52:04 | |
if a disaster like that happened for real. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
Travelling at up to 800 millions an hour, | 0:52:10 | 0:52:13 | |
the giant wave surges out in all directions. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:17 | |
Immediately in its path, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:19 | |
the highly populated island of Tenerife. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:23 | |
Locals and holiday-makers alike | 0:52:24 | 0:52:26 | |
do all they can to outrun it. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:28 | |
Within minutes, | 0:52:42 | 0:52:43 | |
the wave has claimed its first victims. | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
I don't think there's any doubt | 0:52:47 | 0:52:50 | |
that the initial wave will be | 0:52:50 | 0:52:52 | |
very catastrophic for the islands themselves. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
So you're talking about thousands of people dead | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
and destruction on a scale that we've never seen | 0:53:00 | 0:53:02 | |
in this part of the world before. | 0:53:02 | 0:53:04 | |
Our mega tsunami's journey of destruction | 0:53:06 | 0:53:09 | |
has only just begun. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:11 | |
Over the following hours, | 0:53:11 | 0:53:13 | |
these waves will devastate the coastlines of Europe. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:17 | |
The emergency services have just three hours | 0:53:19 | 0:53:22 | |
before the wave strikes Britain. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:25 | |
The Environment Agency issues flood warnings | 0:53:27 | 0:53:29 | |
to the south coast | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
and rescue units are put on standby. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:34 | |
Police clear the streets of southern coastal towns, | 0:53:36 | 0:53:39 | |
evacuating schools and vulnerable communities. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:44 | |
A giant tsunami is spreading | 0:53:44 | 0:53:46 | |
throughout the Atlantic Basin. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:47 | |
Scientists estimate that the wave is travelling | 0:53:47 | 0:53:50 | |
at approximately 500mph. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
Just three hours after the first UK warnings, | 0:53:54 | 0:53:57 | |
a wave up to 25 metres high | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
makes its first landfall in Britain... | 0:54:00 | 0:54:03 | |
..on Cornwall. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:07 | |
From Cornwall, the wave surges | 0:54:18 | 0:54:20 | |
through the English Channel, | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
engulfing much of Britain's south coast. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:25 | |
In our scenario, London, our capital, | 0:54:33 | 0:54:36 | |
tucked in from the North Sea, is safely sheltered. | 0:54:36 | 0:54:40 | |
Models differ on what the wave might do | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
to our southern cities, as it works its way east. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
Towns such as Brighton would suffer serious disruption. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:53 | |
We can get some idea of the impact | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
of a seven to ten-metre wave on the UK south coast, | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
by looking at what happened in the Indian Ocean in 2004 | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
in places like Sri Lanka and Thailand. | 0:55:07 | 0:55:09 | |
The death toll was in the tens of thousands. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:13 | |
The population on the south coast of the UK | 0:55:13 | 0:55:15 | |
is probably quite a bit higher, | 0:55:15 | 0:55:17 | |
so that sort of wave would be immensely destructive in the UK. | 0:55:17 | 0:55:21 | |
But the greatest carnage would be inflicted | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
on the USA, with east coast cities like New York, | 0:55:24 | 0:55:27 | |
directly in the path of the tsunami. | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
New York, Boston, Washington, Miami. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:35 | |
Entire cities have been destroyed. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:38 | |
The number of casualties | 0:55:40 | 0:55:42 | |
is really hard to get at in something like this. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:44 | |
For the 25-metre scenario, | 0:55:44 | 0:55:47 | |
with maybe three to four hours' warning, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:50 | |
we came up with roughly 4.5 million causalities. | 0:55:50 | 0:55:53 | |
Around the world, there may be | 0:55:55 | 0:55:57 | |
one of these enormous events | 0:55:57 | 0:55:59 | |
maybe once every 20,000 years, maybe only once every 50,000 years. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:04 | |
We can't say when the collapse is going to occur. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
It seems to already be close to failure. | 0:56:09 | 0:56:13 | |
So, the crucial question is not a matter of if, but of when. | 0:56:15 | 0:56:21 | |
EXPLOSION | 0:56:21 | 0:56:24 | |
If the worst were to happen, then at least WE'D have some warning, | 0:56:32 | 0:56:37 | |
unlike the people of Pompeii or maybe Atlantis, | 0:56:37 | 0:56:41 | |
who were suddenly overwhelmed | 0:56:41 | 0:56:43 | |
by forces they could only ascribe to the angry gods. | 0:56:43 | 0:56:47 | |
Given that we've only just begun to understand | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
what's happening beneath the Earth's surface in the past few decades, | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
it's little wonder that they looked for supernatural explanation | 0:56:56 | 0:57:00 | |
more than 3,000 years ago. | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
My trawl through the film archive clearly shows | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
that we've learnt a huge amount about natural disasters | 0:57:06 | 0:57:09 | |
in the last half-century, | 0:57:09 | 0:57:12 | |
and we've learnt so fast that it's hard for film-makers to keep up. | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
It's our scientific responsibility to be very humble | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
about the limitations of this knowledge | 0:57:19 | 0:57:21 | |
and what it's based on, but also invite debate. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:25 | |
It's important that new discoveries, that new theories are debated. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:30 | |
There has to be an acknowledgement that science changes. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:32 | |
As a scientist, I treat these films as a snapshot | 0:57:32 | 0:57:37 | |
that captures our understanding at a certain point in time. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
These documentaries, whatever their imperfections, their flaws | 0:57:41 | 0:57:45 | |
and their distortions and all the complaints, you know, | 0:57:45 | 0:57:49 | |
"Things aren't being represented, it's not certain science," | 0:57:49 | 0:57:52 | |
but it's describing possibilities, | 0:57:52 | 0:57:55 | |
and it's possibilities the knowledge of which may save lives. | 0:57:55 | 0:58:00 | |
As these films evolve, it's like actually being an observer | 0:58:01 | 0:58:05 | |
during the discovery process and I'm all in favour of that. | 0:58:05 | 0:58:10 | |
As the years go by, we understand more and more, | 0:58:12 | 0:58:16 | |
so I don't think we've seen the last documentary | 0:58:16 | 0:58:19 | |
on what happened 3,000 years ago in Atlantis, or Pompeii or even here. | 0:58:19 | 0:58:25 | |
Detective Griffin? | 0:59:02 | 0:59:04 | |
Are you good? You all right? | 0:59:04 | 0:59:05 | |
Pleased to be back. | 0:59:05 | 0:59:06 | |
Your baby has been loved by me very much. | 0:59:06 | 0:59:09 | |
I'd like to say thank you. | 0:59:09 | 0:59:10 | |
I like you. | 0:59:11 | 0:59:13 | |
We have a report there's a suitcase washed up. | 0:59:13 | 0:59:15 | |
There's black human hair coming from the inside. | 0:59:15 | 0:59:18 |