500,000 years ago, a cataclysmic underwater eruption on Santorini

by time news

2024-01-19 18:06:00

Par Tristan Vey

Published yesterday at 5:05 p.m., Updated yesterday at 5:06 p.m.

The island of Santorin, Greece, in 2018. Nicole Kwiatkowski / stock.adobe.com

DECRYPTION – Drilling carried out around the Greek archipelago reveals buried traces of a volcanic event of an absolutely unprecedented magnitude for the region.

The volcano island of Santorini was already rich in cataclysmic stories. A violent eruption that occurred 1600 years before Christ caused its heart to disappear, transforming this small Cyclades island into an archipelago. This catastrophic event would have marked the beginning of the fall of the Minoan civilization which was established on the neighboring island of Crete (and to a lesser extent on Santorini). Some even attribute the legend of the sunken city of Atlantis to this brutal explosion, which generated a gigantic fiery cloud and a major tsunami.

An international team of geologists in the journal Communications Earth & Environment (Nature group) reveals this week that this little paradise was the scene of an event of even greater magnitude 500,000 years ago. A titanic underwater eruption which could well be the most important in the entire known history of the Hellenic arc, a vast active zone which crosses the Aegean Sea, from the Peloponnese to Turkey, and linked…

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#years #cataclysmic #underwater #eruption #Santorini

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