"Three and a half thousand years ago, the first great European civilisation collapsed." "Desperate and bewildered people resorted to sacrificing their own children." "What was it that brought them to this terrible end?" "This is the story of a glorious civilisation, and its total collapse." "The Minoan empire was so rich and so inventive it passed in to legend." "At its heart,on the island of Crete,stood mighty palaces." "The largest of them all was Knossos." "But why,at its very peak, did the Minoan's world crumble?" "Floyd McCoy is a geologist determined to solve that mystery." "For decades,he's been captivated by the haunting ruins the Minoans left behind." "Three and a half thousand years ago," "Knossos stood invincible." "Long before the ancient Greek empire flourished," "Knossos was the biggest building in Europe." "Here,Minoans lived in luxury with Europe's first paved roads and running water." "From Crete,the Minoans controlled the vast trading empire." "So powerful were their Navys they lived centuries free from invasion." "But when the Greeks from the mainland finally took over Crete, the Minoans wealth and power had disappeared." "Their towns and palaces went up in flames." "The mystery here is what has happened?" "How and why has this been destroyed." "What has caused this devastation here?" "Trying to answer that question will take Floyd on a remarkable journey, gathering evidence from other scientists around the globe." "But where better to start looking for clues than at Knossos itself, from an archaeologist who used to be a curator here." "Colin Macdonald has evidence of something never seen before in Minoan culture:" "sheer savagery." "Whilst digging near Knossos, archaeologists came across the skull of a small child." "Nearby were the skeletons of four more children." "When they studied these bones more closely, they came to a grim conclusion." "The children had all been murdered." "Those murders had taken place at just the time the Minoan empire was collapsing." "Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the bones which have been found here, were the great knife marks, cut marks, slicing marks on the bones themselves, which indicate that meat was actually sliced off these human bones." "There was also found a large storage jar, and inside were bones with cut marks on them, and an edible snail, called the Buburis snail, and it is highly possible that these were actually cooked together," "and that we are talking about ritual cannibalism." "What could make a civilised people literally devour its own children?" "Floyd believes he's searching for a culprit so powerful, it's shattered the foundations of this society." "A disaster caused by the one force the Minoans thought they understood,nature." "Well,it seems pretty clear that we're looking at a civilisation, a vast civilisation,and suddenly it's gone,it's been done in." "Something quite that big really does point towards natural causes." "This natural disaster has become almost a personal quest." "It's become something to look for, that's hard to stop looking for." "Floyd is no stranger to natural disasters." "He grew up on the islands of Hawaii, home to some of the most spectacular forces of nature,volcanoes." "Well,as a child growing up in Hilo,Hawaii, I was surrounded by volcanoes, and they were erupting every so often,in fact,very often." "And they were wonderful to see." "ln high school we would go up and spend all night just staring at the volcano erupting." "It was just part of my life." "His experiences as a child inspired him to become a geologist, and learn about all the world's volcanoes." "But he became drawn to one in particular, an ancient and mighty explosion that seemed on a scale like no other." "That volcano lies 100 kilometres north of Crete." "It's on a much smaller island, called Thera,today,Santorini." "Three and a half thousand years ago, when the Minoan civilisation was at its height," "Thera erupted, blasting the island apart." "Despite its distance from Crete," "Floyd feels sure the eruption of Thera is the reason behind the end of the Minoans." "He's come to Thera to see the evidence for himself." "Something huge has happened here." "We're at the top of a volcano." "He's a huge hole in the ground, excavated by a tremendous eruption." "Now,I'm from Hawaii, where the volcanoes are perhaps just as big in height, but nothing like this." "They're quiet,tranquil,compared to what has happened here." "This is something of epic proportions." "This is the stuff of legends." "The eruption ripped the heart out of Thera, and the centre of the island crashed in to the sea." "All that remains is a necklace of islands surrounding a vast crater, called a caldera." "Today,the caldera is filled by a deep sea." "The story of what happened that fateful summer is still written in the landscape." "ln this cliff face behind me is a wonderful depiction of what happened during this eruption, the sequence of events." "Each layer tells us such a story about how the eruption proceeded, the dynamics of it, the explositivity, all this kind of thing." "To start with,a lower layer, that textured layer right at the bottom, that's a layer of pumice, pumice like this." "This is pumice." "Light stuff,very frothy material." "It flew up and then plopped down." "The pumice was blasted up into the sky in a plume 36 kilometres high." "It plummeted back to earth, blanketing the island in a layer up to 10 metres thick." "Then the eruption dramatically changed character." "What has happened is sea water has entered the vent over there, it has become ultra explosive." "And out of the vent now comes horizontal sweeping avalanches of hot gas that are pushing pumice and ash across the landscape at really just roaring speeds." "Deadly torrents of searing hot ash swept across the landscape, smothering the entire island." "Now,up there, big rocks start to fly in." "These are huge pieces of lava flows that are parts of the island that is now being blasted to bits." "Then,right up there, another change." "Now torrential rainstorms occur because there is lightning." "Huge thunderstorms develop out of this eruption cloud." "Torrential rains now rain down on the landscape, the whole slope just starts to move downhill." "As it moves downhill,it leaves larger rocks behind, and that's what that layer is right there." "Then the eruption's over." "How long did this take?" "From the start of eruptions, best estimate is about four days." "Give it a day for each one of those layers to happen." "You get an idea of the intensity of what happened here." "Floyd knows the eruption was big." "What he doesn't know is how it could have devastated an entire civilisation." "This eruption happened about three and a half thousand years ago," "3600 years ago this eruption blew." "The timing of the eruption is almost precisely when the civilisation," "Minoan civilisation goes in to a decline." "There has to be a connection." "What could that connection be?" "The clues are beginning to emerge from the ash." "This is Akrotiri,a town on Thera where the eruption claimed its first victims." "It was completely buried by the volcano, and the memory of it vanished." "It was only in the 1960s that Greek archaeologists began to realise what wonders lay hidden." "A layer of pumice, 10 metres thick, covered the town, creating a time capsule." "Buildings up to three storeys high were beautifully preserved." "But what of the people who once lived in these buildings?" "Although it is risky to estimate with the extent of the excavation we have so far, I suspect the estimate of the population is about two and 3,000 people." "But there's a mystery about this bustling town." "No bodies have ever been found." "Christos Doumas believes the people were scared off by the first stirrings of the volcano." "This is the thin layer of ash, and this is found all over the island, everywhere we have excavated." "And after,probably this was the warning for people to leave." "Panicked by this first dusting of ash, the people must have fled Akrotiri, but did they escape the island of Thera itself?" "They couldn't." "To remove so many people you needed a whole fleet." "So where did they go?" "Christos Doumas thinks they fled to this barren patch of land, desperately hoping that enough boats would come and carry them to safety." "This part is one of the harbours." "It is the most obvious place, and perhaps as an escape, what other place would be more convenient than the harbour, where they could have found some means to stay." "Then,the pumice started to come pounding down." "The avalanches of blistering ash that followed erased everything from view." "It was a desperate situation." "Crowds of people could have been cornered, frantically scouring the horizon for boats." "But the eruption was unstoppable, and on this very spot" "Christos Doumas believes the people of Akrotiri were smothered by the ash, the first victims of the volcano." "This is not the only time this kind of human tragedy has happened." "These are the people of the Roman town of Herculaneum." "They too were waiting for boats that never came." "The avalanches of ash that killed them, froze their bodies in time." "The first the Minoans on Crete would have seen was a terrifying sight on the horizon." "A plume of ash 36 kilometres high." "Fortunately, the winds blew the ash in the opposite direction, but the volcano had a lethal legacy they couldn't escape." "Floyd has a theory that the blast was to hit the Minoans in three entirely different ways." "He believes the first blow would have come within days, when Crete was hit by another terrifying force he knows all too well." "ln 1946 he looked on as giant waves battered the island of Hawaii, killing scores of people." "As a young child I saw Hilo, my home town,destroyed by huge waves." "Those waves were 54 feet high in front of our house." "I was terrified later to walk through fields and find debris still left from that wave that might underneath there might be a body or something." "The explosive power of eruptions can bring volcanoes crashing in to the sea, pushing water up in to giant waves called tsunamis." "The waves can travel thousands of kilometres across oceans." "When they hit land,the results can be cataclysmic, as they were a century ago in South East Asia." "Krakatau in Indonesia,1883." "36,000 people killed by an eruption that was far less in intensity, less than half the intensity of this eruption here." "Most people were killed by tsunamis." "This means then that we should perhaps be looking for tsunami deposits here, deposits left by these large waves." "Evidence of those deposits has eluded archaeologists for decades." "Now,Floyd has heard of an intriguing find that just might be what he's looking for." "ln 1997,a team of geologists came to this salt water marsh." "They drilled deep down in to the ground and removed a core of mud." "Back at a laboratory in Britain, one of the team started sifting through the core." "After months of patient work," "Dale Dominey-Howes found what he was looking for, tiny fossilised shells called forams." "The forams are actually very helpful to us, because they live in a whole range of different environmental settings." "Some like living in very shallow marine conditions, like on marshes,others prefer to live in estuaries, and others in much deeper water." "They're actually very useful, because each individual species looks very different." "Under the microscope, the difference between the shells becomes clear." "The one on the right once lived in shallow water." "The one on the left originally lived in very deep water." "As Dale examined the mud core more closely, he found something very peculiar." "As you go down through the core, you're going back in time, and all through the larger part of the core we're finding absolutely no forams at all." "When you get to this point, something very exciting happens." "There's a very thin band or layer of sand, and this sand is absolutely stuffed with marine forams." "This type of forams found in the layer are fully marine and come from much deeper water off shore." "This means something very unusual happened here." "A very unusual high energy event that's brought these deep water species from off shore in to the marsh." "So I suspect that this is actually a signature of a tsunami that's flooded in to the marsh." "Dale's evidence suggests the volcano on Thera produced waves that travelled 100 kilometres across the open sea." "Their effect would have been felt right along the northern coast of Crete, but most of all at harbour towns like Palaikastro." "Floyd has come to Palaikastro to meet one man who can tell him exactly how destructive those waves might have been." "Costas Synolakis chases tsunamis around the world." "As they break, he rushes to the scene to map their destruction." "This time,Costas has come home." "He was brought up on Crete." "With his expert knowledge, he's built a sophisticated computer model of tsunamis." "Costas has spent weeks feeding data about the Theran eruption in to his computer." "Now he's ready to show Floyd the results." "Can we see the wave in motion?" "Yes,let's try to get the animations, and you see,this is the initial wave.." "Oh,there it is." "Aha." "It has already been generated, the eruption has taken place." "Oh,look at that." "Oh,that's really neat." "Costas's model shows the waves coming from Thera and hitting the coast of Crete." "At Palaikastro the bay is enclosed, and the waves would have become trapped." "Their effect magnified." "Look at that." "So the high water comes in, inundates things,and stays." "Yes,it does." "Because you have waves that are getting trapped in there, inside this bay." "This is why Palaikastro is such a unique location, because not only do you have the effect of the first wave coming in, but you have the effect of the trapped waves." "Of the trapped waves." "that are trapped inside the bay." "So,if one building wasn't destroyed, it's going to be destroyed." "Unfortunately for the Minoans,yes." "The waves at Palaikastro would have formed a towering wall of water three metres high." "What kind of damage would that do?" "Well,you know,a three metre wave coming in in to a small harbour would have been devastating." "All of the boats and ships would have been sort of strewn out on the coast everywhere." "And here is a civilisation that depended on boats and trade." "It would have been devastating." "Well,there would have been nothing left." "One of the things that we find out in the field when we go there a week after a tsunami hits, is we cannot find absolutely any boats to use in our surveys." "Why?" "Because all of the boats, they're gone." "They've all been destroyed." "They've all been destroyed." "And it wouldn't have been just the boat, the wave would have travelled up -stream on the river, and would have been flooded, the area surrounding the river." "So salt in the soils would have destroyed the soil?" "Yes." "And one could couple that with the fact that all of their warehouses, storage areas or their food supplies that they were bringing in or exporting would all have been destroyed or wet." "All this by a three metre wave, a ten foot wall of water." "The waves would have been even more destructive on other parts of the North coast." "ln some places they would have reached 12 metres high." "Floyd is now sure tsunamis devastated the coast." "But the huge waves weren't enough to wipe out an entire civilisation." "There must have been more." "His hunt for the eruption's longer lasting impact begins with Afresco." "We're extraordinarily fortunate in that wonderful pieces of art were preserved in the ash that buried the ancient city of Akrotiri, and among that art is an image of what the island looked like before the eruption." "And in there is a very nice depiction of an island sitting inside another island with a ring of water around it." "But,most extraordinary, it shows a huge city sitting on that island." "All of that may represent the pre-eruption landscape, and if so,then there was even a larger city sitting within that caldera, and all of that island city vaporised by the eruption." "The evidence of another city on Thera is puzzling." "How could an island this small support so many people in such luxury?" "Archaeologists are unearthing clues that show just how crucial Thera was as a source of the Minoans legendary wealth." "ln this building alone, they discovered 400 pots." "So many,they must have been produced on an industrial scale." "Then they found a vast number of lead discs, precisely cast to the Minoan standard for weights and measures." "We have,so far,discovered here two thirds of the total amount of lead weights found in the entire Aegean, including Crete." "So trade was the main activity which produced wealth." "And therefore,we could say that it is a kind of Hong Kong of pre-historic Aegean." "Archaeologists already knew that the Minoan's trading empire spanned three continents." "Now they realised that Thera was one of the most important market places in the Aegean, where the Minoan world came to buy and sell its goods." "When the eruption ripped the island apart, that market place was wiped out." "lmpacts of this eruption on the Minoans,I mean,on Crete, suddenly their trading hub here is gone,vaporised." "This core of their trade route has disappeared." "That had to have had a huge impact." "Floyd now believes the Minoans suffered a series of blows." "The people of Thera were engulfed by the ash." "Huge waves wrought havoc on the coast of Crete." "The market place of Minoan empire was obliterated, but he thinks even this wasn't enough to destroy the Minoan civilisation." "He's sure the volcano had another legacy, the most deadly yet." "This part of the story starts back on the island of Thera, with a brain wave from one British geologist." "Steve Sparks has spent decades studying the scale of the eruption." "But over the years, one piece of the puzzle simply refused to fit." "Algae." "Fossilised algae lie littered high up on the slopes of Thera, but that doesn't make sense." "This type of algae doesn't live on hillsides." "Steve saw that the algae must have been blasted up here by the force of the explosion." "But from where?" "It could only have been from a place where these algae do live, a shallow sea." "That means there must once have been a shallow sea inside the crater." "Now,a new picture of the island before the blast was beginning to emerge." "This is what the volcano might have looked like if you'd looked at it from a satellite at that time." "You can see here, this large caldera depression already existing." "You can also see a large volcanic island which must have existed, because there's very good evidence that this island was blown up during the Minoan eruption, and you can find bits of it in the deposit." "This new picture, with a differently shaped island and a shallow sea, had startling implications for the scale of the eruption." "I was walking along the caldera rim with a research student a few years ago, looking down in to the great caldera, and it suddenly struck me that the existence of the shallow sea, before the eruption," "might mean that the eruption's actually very much larger than we'd previously supposed." "Could it be that all previous estimates were too low?" "The size of this eruption had been estimated from the amount of ash that came pouring out." "Steve now suspected that millions of tons of ash may not have been counted because the shallow sea would have trapped that ash until it was filled to the brim." "If this hypothesis is right, then an enormous amount of volcanic ash was trapped within the caldera itself, and when the caldera collapsed and crashed down in to the earth, this material would have been taken with it." "The force of the blast brought the volcano crashing down, and created the deep sea that exists today." "And Steve is convinced that at the bottom of that deep sea lies a thick layer of ash." "Add this hidden ash to previous estimates, and the real size of the eruption doubles." "This would make it perhaps the second largest eruption on earth in the last 10,000 years." "Up to 70 cubic kilometres of ash were blasted in to the atmosphere." "And with that ash came something else far more destructive;" "sulphurous gas." "If we were right about the scale of this eruption, then it could have been very bad news for the Minoans, because not only would there have been an enormous amount of volcanic ash in the atmosphere, but very large amounts of volcanic gas," "in particular,sulphur dioxide." "This would have had implications for the Minoans, because larger eruptions of this kind, with huge amounts of sulphur dioxide can alter climate, and this may have had an effect, a big effect after the eruption." "Steve's idea of doubling, nearly doubling the size of this eruption here on Thera now brings it up to the same category as the eruption, for example,of Tambora, 1815 in Indonesia." "That eruption was huge, the biggest in the last 10,000 years." "It changed the global climate for years afterwards." "ln fact,the year directly after that eruption, was known as the year without a summer." "There was frost in New England, in England,in Germany, crops could not grow, and it led to mass starvation." "Might the Minoans on Crete have faced a climate change just as severe?" "The answer may lie with climate modeller,Mike Rampino." "Large explosive volcanic eruptions put a lot of dust and fine ash up in to the atmosphere." "But they also put sulphur dioxide gas." "And this goes up about 20 miles up in to the atmosphere." "It's converted in to little droplets of sulphuric acid, and these fine droplets act like a veil, cutting out the sunlight that would normally come in and warm the earth's surface, and causing the earth's surface to get cool." "If Mike Rampino knows how much sulphur is produced by an eruption, his computer model can forecast how much the climate will change." "We're using a new estimate of the size of the eruption, supplied by Steve Sparks." "And Steve suggests that the eruption was twice as big as we previously thought." "We put that much volcanic aerosols in to the atmosphere in our computer model and spread it around the world, we see quite a significant effect on the earth's climate." "We can see, from the blue colours here, a climatic cooling,especially concentrated in Europe and Asia and North America, of one to two degrees Celsius." "That doesn't sound like very much, but that's the average annual temperature drop." "The summer temperature, which is the most important for crops, would drop even more than the annual average." "And so the summers at these times would be especially cool, especially wet, and the crop yields will suffer accordingly." "Mike's model suggests years of ruined harvests." "But without physical evidence," "Floyd would have no more than an enticing theory." "Proof has come from an unlikely source far away." "The bogs of Ireland." "Slices of trees from these bogs contain a record of climate stretching back over 7,000 years." "Each year,the trees put on a ring of growth." "During the good years, those growth rings are thick, in bad years,so small they can be hard to measure." "When Mike Baillie measured the tree rings in one particular sample, something made him sit up and take notice." "This is a piece of Irish oak." "It grew for about 300 years and then was buried in a peat bog, and survived to the present time." "It was actually growing about three and a half thousand years ago." "Now,my interest in this is that when you look at the exactly dated rings across this period, you find that the tree has been growing quite well, up until 1628 BC, which is this ring," "and 1627 there's no summer growth nor in 1626, nor for about 10 years thereafter." "And these are the narrowest rings in the entire life of this tree, and clearly it's the worst growth conditions that this tree had seen in its lifetime." "The trees can't tell us exactly what happened, but the logic is that they were probably responding to increased coldness, or increased wetness, or possibly both." "And the thing about wetness on a peat bog is that if you raise the amount of water in the peat, raise the water table, you're likely to cover up the roots of the trees and affect them in that way." "So I certainly became interested in whether this environmental downturn, probably involving cold and wet, was due to the eruption of Thera." "Absolute proof that the Irish oak trees were stunted by the eruption of Thera has just been reported from one of the most desolate parts of the world." "The ice sheets of Greenland have built up over thousands of years, from annual layers of snow." "As the snow falls,anything lingering in the atmosphere is swept up and locked in to the ice." "Sulphur from volcanic eruptions is trapped as sulphuric acid." "The snow that fell three and a half thousand years ago is now over 700 metres deep." "When Danish scientists tested the ice at that level, they found a layer of sulphuric acid." "Embedded in that acid layer were tiny shards of volcanic ash." "The shards have just been chemically fingerprinted." "The unpublished results have convinced the scientists that the ash came from Thera." "It's fantastic news, because it - what it gives us is the final link in the chain." "What you've got is Thera linked to the acid in Greenland, the acid in Greenland is occurring at exactly the same time as this reduced growth in the Irish trees." "So what you're seeing here are the direct environmental consequences of the eruption of Thera, and that is fantastic." "Floyd is now convinced that the volcano's aftermath so damaged the climate, harvests failed." "He's tantalisingly close to explaining how the Minoans were felled by the eruption." "And yet,there's one last problem that threatens to jeopardise his entire theory." "Clay tablets." "Many were written decades after the eruption." "Covered with Minoan writing, they're proof that their culture survived well beyond the blast." "It was fully 50 years after the eruption that a new script appeared." "An ancient form of Greek, the language of the Minoans conquerors." "The problem we have is that the eruption itself can not be said to have wiped out Minoan civilisation." "Minoan civilisation continued, although it declined for at least a 50 year period after the eruption itself." "The Minoans had survived each successive blow from the volcano, the eruption itself,the tsunamis and the failed harvests." "But these blows had gone deep." "How deep would only become clear with the final piece of the puzzle." "It was found near the Royal Palace of Knossos, buried amongst the bones of the five murdered children." "The children's bones were found in this very, very small area here, in a burnt destruction layer." "And with these bones,which were in a state of disorder, were also found vases which we term ritual." "The striking thing about these vases is the way they were decorated." "They're covered with sea creatures." "Some have star fish,several are painted with octopus." "The Minoans were painting the vases they used for religion with images from the deep." "For Colin,the timing is crucial." "He believes it's only after the eruption and the tsunamis, that they started using this so-called marine style." "This association of the marine style and ritual vases is very important, because it indicates to us a totally new awareness of the power of the sea." "And this was incorporated in to their religion as a totally new aspect of their religion, probably to try and ward off future disasters which might have appeared to them to emanate from the sea, to come from the sea itself." "The pottery suggests the damaging after effects of the volcano were as much psychological as physical." "Colin believes the Minoans began to see their natural world in an entirely different way." "Before the eruption,the Minoans observed rigid hierarchy." "At the top stood the kings in palaces like Knossos, revered as priests as well as rulers." "They controlled the shrines to the gods, they were even deemed capable of controlling the force of nature itself." "But a stunning archaeological find has convinced Colin that after the eruption, all this changed." "First,a glimmer of gold, then an ivory leg." "Once they restored it, the archaeologists realised they'd found a religious statue" "But what was so striking was where it was found." "Far from the palace, where the priest kings presided, in a humble building in Palaikastro, which lay beyond their control." "Colin believes this shrine shows" "Minoan society had fallen apart from within." "After the eruption,communities such as Palaikastro, no longer believed in the divine authority of the big palatial centres like Knossos." "And this is all part of the fragmentation of society that we see in the 50 year period following the eruption itself." "And this actually created a vacuum, and it was in to this vacuum that mainland Greek's marched and ended Minoan culture and civilisation as we knew it before." "This is wonderful." "This means that the eruption, the Thera eruption had not so much an immediate effect, but a prolonged effect on the society." "Floyd believes he's now pieced together what happened to the Minoans." "Nature, in the form of the volcano, the giant waves,and the climate change had betrayed them." "Desperate to repel these strange new terrors, the people turned away from their kings." "They took their religion in to their own hands." "Order turned to chaos." "And perhaps this is what explains the dreadful fate of the five children." "ln desperation,some Minoans were driven to extremes to win back their gods." "They sacrificed their children, the greatest offering they had." "For Floyd,the quest is over." "ln the end,it wasn't only the physical damage that brought the Minoans to their knees." "He's convinced that Minoan society finally fell apart when the world they thought they knew, turned against them." "Did these people have a sense of conquering nature, did they have a sense that they could occupy this landscape and control it?" "Quite likely." "We have the same notion today, I think,in thinking that we have conquered our environment and we've conquered nature." "But,you know, nature can strike back." "The cataclysmic event is going to happen again."