Underwater lands that submerge after the Ice Age could give humanity the secrets and answers on how to combat the current issue of climate change. This statement was the battle cry of global experts in archaeology, climate change, history, and oceanography at the Royal Society meeting held last May 15.
Eugene Ch'ng from University of Nottingham Ningbo China said the modeling, mapping, and analyzing lost underwater lands with massive ancient terrestrial and marine landscape ecology that has spanned thousands of square kilometers have implications for the discovery and applications of solutions for climate change.Ch'ng is a known expert in modeling and visualization of large ancient lands and marine landscapes. "We need to develop strategies for scalable agent-based modeling, simulation, and visualization in time and space of large ancient landscapes," he said. He added that the current barrier for having a massive agent-based modeling it the computational resources that are required to store and stimulate detail interactions in 3D terrains.
The last Ice Age, which has ended approximately 20,000 years ago, caused climate change that made populated landscapes sink beneath the city, making them lost underwater lands. It includes lands from Britain and mainland Europe called Doggerland. This effect also includes large areas in South East Asia and lands around and between modern Siberia and Alaska.
In an article published in Phys.org, Dr. Ch'ng proposes high-performance computing techniques that could successfully simulate hypothetical models of massive lost underwater lands up to 100,000 square kilometers. In this way, it could help research in getting information about the climate change that has happened in that geological age.
Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford, said that the lost underwater lands are inaccessible to most archaeologists. "The data that has been gathered has often been fragmentary, and many areas of interest are sealed beneath marine sediments but modern technologies are now enabling archaeologists to mine these sites and extract new information about how these landscapes responded to huge environmental, cultural and technological changes," he said. If this is fixed, Gaffney believes that experts could have new insights and approaches to the current climate change issue.
The talk titled "Royal Society's 2017 Theo Murphy International Scientific Meeting," is organized by archaeologists from Universities of Bradford, York, St Andrews, Warwick, and Nottingham Ningbo China. The talk aims to bring world-class scientists to talk about solving issues of climate change through innovative ideas like examining lost underwater lands.
