LONDON SINKING

Taranaki Daily News, 5 August 1937, Page 5

LONDON SINKING

4 SLOW RATE OVER CENTURIES. EVIDENCE IN PAST FEW YEARS. London is sinking. It has been doing so for 5000 years at the rate of an inch in just ovor five years. During the whole perioiS there has been a drop of 80 feet. But it has not been by regular stages. There is clear evidence that since the Tudor period only 400 years ago there has been a sinking of at least eight feet. ... A few years ago the authorities were taken by surprise with serious flooding at Chelsea and some lives were lost. Previously no change had been made in the height of the Thames walls since the building of the Embankment in the early part of the nineteenth century. Yet suddenly there was serious flooding and evidence from other parts of the coast showed that it was not caused by an abnormally high tide. There had been a sudden drop in the level of the land. Since then the sinking movement must have continued. Flourisliing Town. In ' Roman times a flourishing town called Regulbium stood three miles inland from the sea coast where Margate now stands. At the present day all that remains of this town are two towers. upon the seashore at Reculver, near Margate. In another case old records state that in i014 in the reign of Edward the Confessor. "A great sea flood spread wide over the land, overwhelmed many towna a- i an innumerable multitude of people were drowned." At the time of this inundation a group of islands in the North Sea which had been a fishing centre was entirely swallowed up. / An instance of a town which has actually "gone to sea" is Old Winchelsea was given to the surviving inhabitants of Old Winchelsea by King Edward III. It, was at this time that the Zuyder Zee was formed. Up to that time only a tiny fresh water lake had exSsted on the land which is now the bed of the Zuyder Zee. Conunercial Centre. Dunwich in East Suffolk was the most important commercial centre of East Anglia during Anglo Saxton times.' It had suffered by sea encroachment in the eleventh century, but in 1347 it was almost destroyed and the inhabitants rebuilt it further inland. -

Even this could not preserve it, however, and in 1570 it was agam destroyed and an appeal to Queen Elizabeth was made by the inhabitants. To-day the site of the Saxon town of Dunwich is some miles out to sea • off the Norfolk coast. Only the sinking of land can cause the submersions. Many people think that they are due to the sea eating away the coastline and gradually .imdermining the land. But there is no such thing as coast erosion without coast subsidence. The sinking of land is not confined to the English coast, and the movement is beyond the power of man to wholly control, for the whole earth's crust is in perpetual movement. ' The top of the Himalayas, including Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, 29,140 feet high, was once the bed of a deep sea. Submerged Repeatedly. The British Isles have been submerged repeatedly, only to be thrust up again time' after time. But they have spent much more of their geological history as the bed of the sea than as a group of islands. Although so much of the country's time has been spent beneath the sea, there was one period, lasting perhaps for a quarter^ of a million years, when there was no North Sea and no Irish Sea. The land extended from Norway in the north and Spain in the south right out into Ihe Atlanti Ocean to a little farther west than Ireland now stands. When this land formation was in existence the Rhine, which now flows into the North Sea on the Dutch coast, flowed .across a plain whicH is now the bed of the North Sea. ; _ The forest which covered this plain still remains beneath the North Sea, and the stumps of the trees can be seen at low water at many places along the East Coast. The Thames at this time was a tributary of the Rhine, and another large river flowed through the valley which is now the bed of the English Channel. , France's largest river, the Seine, was a tributary of this river 'and the waters of the two rivers flowed on to the Atlantic at a spot some miles west of what is now Land's End. High Average Altitude. The average altitude of the whole of the land which we know as Great Britain was at this period at least 1000 feet higher than it is now, and the tops of the mountains such as Snowdon and Ben Nevis were covered in perpetual snow. The margin between safety and disasfer is only a narrow one. At best, some of the most thickly populated parts of London are only a few inches above danger level. 1 ■ ■■ A tide five feet above present high level would prove disastrous. Many parts of South' London would be flooded. The water would pour over the Embankment walls, all the docks, the East End of London? Pimlico and Chelsea would be under water. Even the ground floor of Buckingham Palace would be flooded. A tide 13 feet above the highest level known to the present would be a national catastrophe. Much of London would be submerged and the sea waves would reach as far as Molesey, above Richmond. Outside of London the effects «would be even more severe. A great paH of Essex and Kent would be engulfed, and Romney Marsh would cease to exist. Even the west coast would be affected. Cardiff would be inundated, and a great lake formed between Cheddar and Bridgwater. ^