AS THE OCEAN RISES

Many people base their identities, esp. when they are dependent on the world as they knew it growing up, on the land as it shaped culture and even the DNA of the inhabitants.  This was more reliable when people stayed in one place so there was little interference from people who know a different land.  Nothing changed very quickly, so what one's great-grandpa told the youngsters stayed true.  Then they could talk about race.  But there were always stories about a land that sank beneath the sea, like Atlantis.

It has been one of the great hardships and scary confusions that big important people talked about a land "bridge" between Siberia and Alaska.  Politicians capitalized on of fear of Others and guilt about the Euros invading America, pushing back and infecting and murdering the people who were already there.  They pictured a line of early people in single file "invading" America by marching across a narrow "bridge."

In reaction, the indigenous people of the Americas declared that they were ALWAYS in America, sprang up mysteriously already shaped into tribes right where they are.  This defied the historical written records of the last few centuries when they were displaced from the east coast, died in pandemics, turned against each other, and tried to find safety on reservations.

Today talking about the Bering Land Bridge will get you into an hysterical fight about something that happened ten thousand years ago.  Among the onslaught of new information that has upended what we thought we knew, is the slow realization that we were all wrong.  There was no "land bridge."  It was a low country, quite broad and stable for a long time until the melting of the polar caps made sea level rise enough to submerge the whole area, something like Bangladesh today.  It's called Berengia and people lived there for thousands of years.

In fact, around the world all the lowlands began to act like Atlantis, the legendary country that sank beneath the sea.  The lowlands that once connected the British Isles, recent enough to have been recorded, were called "Doggerland".  The English channel was not a channel then, any more than Berengia was a land bridge.  This is a map of Doggerland, made from evidence found in new technology.

More recently, another lost land, not quite Atlantis, has been found under the Mediterranean Sea,  It existed 140 million years, before there were people there, but nevertheless named "Greater Adria."  Later it got shoved beneath southern Europe—was broken up and pushed deep under Europe where pieces are submerged in magma, "earth hell."

"Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged, not beneath an ocean somewhere, but largely below southern Europe.

The researchers’ analysis represents “a huge amount of work,” says Laurent Jolivet, a geologist at Sorbonne University in Paris who was not involved in the new study. Although the tectonic history of the landmass has been generally known for a few decades, he says, “[T]he amount of detail in the team’s systematic time-lapse reconstruction is unprecedented.”

"The only visible remnants of the continent—known as Greater Adria—are limestones and other rocks found in the mountain ranges of southern Europe. Scientists believe these rocks started out as marine sediments and were later scraped off the landmass’s surface and lifted up through the collision of tectonic plates. Yet the size, shape, and history of the original landmass—much of which lay beneath shallow tropical seas for millions of years—have been tough to reconstruct."

“The Mediterranean region is quite simply a geological mess,” he says. 'Everything is curved, broken, and stacked.' In the new study, van Hinsbergen and his colleagues spent more than 10 years collecting information about the ages of rock samples thought to be from Greater Adria, as well as the direction of any magnetic fields trapped in them. That let the researchers identify not just when, but where, the rocks were formed."

It turns out the variations in the height of the ocean caused by melting, as we are seeing before our faces on photos and TV graphs, have profound impacts on everything else.  When the sea level was relatively low, as it was before, the early evidence was found of the peopling of the Americas by boatsmen riding the Japanese gyring current that carries SE Asia debris from monsoons to the coast of South America.  Estimates are arrival about 60,000 years ago.  Some of the evidence is what might be called "sailor's knots" made by a people with that technology.

"Other researchers who use seismic waves to generate computerized tomography–like images of structures deep within Earth have created an “atlas of the underworld”—a graveyard of slabs of crust that have sunk into the mantle. This research shows that portions of Greater Adria now lie as much as 1500 kilometers below our planet’s surface."

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/atlas-underworld-reveals-oceans-and-mountains-lost-earths-history

Losing beneath the oceans whole near-continents, the more recent with established dwellings, and miles of seacoast where today's wealthy people love to live, is only part of the consequences.  The persisting and present continents guide the currents that flow among them, which affects the echoing streams of air above.  The changes of temperature at our poles affect forces like the jet stream that push our climates across the land, but also submerging something like the Panama isthmus will make a new path for the giant sea currents.  

The existence of human beings is due to the major part of their beings as culture rather than more rigid flesh-embedded responses.  But it means change.  At the least the preservation of Manhattan will mean a sea-wall around the island.  But on the global scale the climate and seasons will change drastically, causing droughts as well as flooding.  Many populations will not survive as nations.

It's not just the mistaken notion of the Bering Straits being a "land bridge" that is too old-fashioned to persist, but also the idea that humans, with our relatively short lives, can keep on believing what the new scientific technologies are teaching us enough to cope with them.