What is it about?
The lost harbours of the Phoenician island city of Tyre have been found by combining onshore coring and offshore flooded remnants of ancient breakwaters. The harbours were abandoned when Alexander the Great built a causeway to seize the island, because sand piled up against the causeway and filled the harbours.
Featured Image
Photo by Konstantin Dyadyun on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Today, harbour structures, and structures built to control coastal erosion, are built by the thousands all over the world. They strongly disrupt the displacement of sand along coastlines, triggering erosion at places, and burial of coastal settlements at others. It is a major, costly issue. The studies of modern cases lack the time-depth of historical cases, which provide us centuries of coastal changes following a case of disturbance. Tyre is one of the most spectacular cases of Antiquity in the Mediterranean Sea, with a 750 m-long causeway built across coastal currents. It hosts evidence of three millennia of human-triggered coastal changes, and document the adverse effects that these changes had on various coastal structures.
Perspectives
A vast coring campaign conducted in 2023 which provided us with 23 new cores which confirm the findings of this publication.
Dr Gilles Brocard
University of Lyon 2
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Growth of the sandy isthmus of tyre and ensuing relocation of its harbors, Quaternary Science Reviews, January 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108463.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
