Dancing Minoan woman from fresco fragment 1600-1450 BCE

January 20, 2020

Dancing Minoan woman from fresco fragment 1600-1450 BCE

"Sometime during the mid-second millennium BC, Santorini erupted. It was one of the biggest volcanic events in human history. In the past 800 years only Mount Tambora in Indonesia has erupted with such force, and Tambora was responsible for a global “year without a summer” in 1816.

The eruption sent devastating tsunamis across the eastern Mediterranean that smashed into the Minoans on Crete, at the time one of the world’s most advanced civilisations.

The Santorini volcano is a caldera, a type of volcano that erupts so violently that its middle collapses in on itself forming a huge crater. How this crater came to be is the focus of a new paper in Nature Communications by Paraskevi Nomikou and colleagues. They have published high-resolution seabed maps and combined these with seismic evidence for what rocks the seabed is made of in the caldera to explain how the volcano collapsed, filled with water and might have produced tsunamis.

Prior to the eruption the modern caldera did not exist. Instead a smaller caldera, from a much older eruption, formed a lagoon at the north of the solitary island. Near the modern town of Akrotiri stood a Minoan settlement, a bustling town with three-storey buildings, narrow streets and courtyards, quite different from the palace complexes found in the Minoan homeland of Crete. The prehistoric Akrotiri may have been home to hundreds or thousands of people, and was probably an important trading port for the eastern Mediterranean."

-taken from theconversation link below