1. What is matter? What is experience? The first of these questions is constantly pestered by idealists, agnostics, including the Machians, to materialists; with the second - materialists to Machists. Let us try to figure out what is the matter here. Avenarius says on the question of matter: “Inside

The Mediterranean basin became the cradle of European civilization. The history of the Mediterranean Sea, according to many scientists, can also become the "key" to the history of our planet, to the history of the origin of the continents and oceans. A lot of hypotheses trying to explain the geological evolution of the Earth have been put forward over the past centuries. In principle, they can be divided into two groups. The first combines hypotheses that explain the history of the Earth by vertical movements of the crust - the uplifting of mountains, the failures of oceanic depressions, the formation of continents in place of deep seas, or, conversely, the "oceanization" of the continental crust. The second group, in addition to these vertical movements of the crust, also suggests horizontal ones, caused by the drift of the continents, the expansion of the Earth, etc.

The most venerable age is the hypothesis according to which our planet was originally dressed in continental pores. The oceans arose at the site of the sinking of the ancient continents - the Atlantic where Atlantis used to be, the Pacific - on the site of the "Pacific Atlantis", or Pacifida, the Indian - on the site of Lemuria. The Mediterranean Sea, according to supporters of this hypothesis, is also generated by the failure of the earth's crust: the Aegean and Tyrrenida became the bottom of the sea, the Balearic Islands, Malta, and Cyprus are the fragments of the former land. In a word, the area of ​​the Mediterranean Sea is the area of ​​the underdeveloped ocean, which divided Europe and Africa, which previously constituted a single ancient continent.

Over a hundred years ago, the largest American geologist J. Dana put forward a diametrically opposite hypothesis: not the continents, but the oceans are the primary, initial formation. The entire planet was covered by an oceanic-type crust, which was formed even before the formation of the atmosphere. "An ocean is always an ocean," was Dan's thesis. Its modern formulation is: "The great oceanic basins are a permanent feature of the earth's surface, and they have existed where they are now, with slight changes in outline since the waters first arose." The evolution of the earth's crust is a steady increase in the area of ​​the continents and a reduction in the area of ​​the oceans. The Mediterranean Sea is the remnant of the ancient Tethys Ocean, which separated Europe and North Asia from Africa, Hindustan and Indochina tens of millions of years ago.

The sea - or ocean - Tethys is given a large place in the constructions of mobilists - supporters of the hypothesis of continental drift. At the end of the Paleozoic, about 200 million years ago, as the creator of this hypothesis suggested, the remarkable German scientist Alfred Wegener, a single land mass, Pangea, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, split into two supercontinents: northern - Laurasia and southern - Gondwana. The “gap” between these supercontinents, steadily expanding, gave rise to the Tethys Sea, a kind of bay of a single pra-ocean or all-ocean (Pantalassa) that embraced the entire planet. Then the split of Laurasia and Gondwana into separate continents began, the movement of continental plates became more complicated. As Europe, North America, India, Africa, Australia, Antarctica "dispersed", the Atlantic, Indian, Arctic oceans formed - and at the same time the area of ​​the Tethys Sea was reduced. The majestic Alps of the Caucasus, the Pamirs, the Himalayan mountains, which were once the bottom of the Tethys, rose. And from the Tethys Sea itself, only the Mediterranean and the Black Sea associated with it remained.

Proponents of the continental drift hypothesis in its modern version believe that the Mediterranean Sea arose as a result of the "spreading" of the seabed (the so-called spreading) in a dynamic band between the continental plates of Europe and Africa. Scientists who believe that the main cause of continental drift is the expansion of the Earth, which began hundreds of millions of years ago - they also belong to the mobilists - believe that the Mediterranean Sea is also generated by this expansion.

What happened before the collapse of Pangea, surrounded by Panthalasse, began? This question has been asked by both supporters and opponents of the continental drift hypothesis. Does the history of the face of the Earth cover only some 200 million years, when, according to the mobilists, the Tethys Sea split the single land into Laurasia and Gondwana? Soviet geologists L. P. Zonenshain and A. M. Gorodnitsky tried to draw, from the standpoint of mobilism, a picture of the changes that have taken place on our planet over the past half a billion years. In the Cambrian period, which began the "ancient era of life" - the Paleozoic, a single supercontinent Gondwana, the European, Siberian, Chinese and North American paleocontinents were separated by paleooceans - the Paleoatlantic and Paleoasian. In the next period, the Ordovician, which began about 480 million years ago, the Siberian and Chinese paleocontinents moved, the southern part of the Paleo-Atlantic Ocean closed, but a new ocean formed - Paleotethys, which separated the northern continents from the eastern ones and from the Gondwana supercontinent, parts of which are present-day Africa, South America , Australia, India, Madagascar, Antarctica.

In the Devonian period, 390 million years ago, the northern part of the Paleo-Atlantic Ocean began to close, while the southern part, on the contrary, opened up and merged with Paleotethys. In the Carboniferous period, 340 million years ago, the convergence of the northern and eastern paleocontinents began, and in the Permian period, which ends the Paleozoic era, Laurasia and Gondwana almost completely unite into a single Pangea - it does not include only the Chinese continent, which forms a kind of island between two branches of Paleo-Tethys . In the next era, the Mesozoic, the disintegration of Laurasia and Gondwana takes place, and at the end of it, in the Cretaceous period, the western part of the Tethys becomes the Mediterranean Sea, closed by the overhanging plates of Europe and Africa (if the forecasts of mobilists are correct, then in 50 million years the Mediterranean Sea will disappear completely and Europe will connect with North Africa).

Proponents of the continental drift hypothesis tried to paint a clearer picture of the history of the Mediterranean basin, based on the fact that in addition to large continental plates, such as the European or African, smaller plates and microcontinents also came into motion. They number over two dozen such microcontinents: Iranian, Turkish, Sinai, Rhodope, Apulian, Iberian, Sahelian, Calabrian, Balearic, Corsicano-Sardinian, Tatra, Lanzarote-Fuerteventura (future Canary Islands), etc. But, despite all interesting reconstructions, and to this day the history of the Mediterranean Sea remains a kind of natural testing ground, where the hypotheses of the primacy of the oceans and the primacy of the continents, the drift of the continents and the expanding Earth are tested, because each of them explains in its own way the origin of the inland sea lying between Europe, Africa and Asia.

Despite all the disagreements between scientists who adhere to one or another hypothesis about the origin of the Mediterranean Sea, modern science has accumulated enough facts to outline the main stages of its history and development. Moreover, it becomes obvious that this history is not as simple and one-linear as it seemed before the latest studies of geologists, geophysicists and oceanologists (for example, the history of the eastern part of the Mediterranean is very different from the history of its western part - during their formation, apparently, various processes took place that took place in the lithosphere). This is how Soviet scientists paint the history of the Mediterranean Sea in general terms in the monograph "The Earth's Crust and the History of the Development of the Mediterranean Sea", which summarizes the results of research on international geophysical projects. First of all, in their opinion, it is necessary to distinguish between two main stages in the history of the development of the Mediterranean Sea: ancient and young, and the ancient one is, in essence, the prehistory of the Mediterranean stage itself, breaking down into three stages: early, perioceanic and pre-Mediterranean.

The early stage falls on the Paleozoic era. “It ended with the formation of a consolidated basement underlying the sedimentary strata in most of the basins of the Mediterranean. The process occurred spontaneously, and its termination was different in different parts: in the southern basin of the Central Basin and in the Eastern Basin - in the early Precambrian (Archaean) - the beginning of the Paleozoic, in the rest of the territory - during the Paleozoic, - we read in the monograph "Earth's crust and history of the development of the Mediterranean. - In certain periods of the Paleozoic, a certain unity of the entire Mediterranean region is outlined, as evidenced, in particular, by the distribution of Ordovician-Silurian clay facies. Analyzing the available materials on the Upper Paleozoic (Carboniferous, Permian) and the nature of the transition from the Paleozoic complexes to the Mesozoic, most researchers ... Do not find direct evidence of the existence of the Late Paleozoic latitudinal ocean (pra-Tethys) between Europe and Africa in the Hercynian stage of development. Indeed, all the studied sections testify to the wide development of coastal and shallow-marine facies in the absence of an oceanic type of formations even in the Alpine geosynclinal region. The Upper Paleozoic Proto-Tethys was probably developed to the east, where more reliable data of its existence in Central Asia were found.

The distribution of land and sea in the Jurassic. Central Europe was temporarily covered by shallow seas, but uplifts of the seabed in the Tethys indicate mountain-building processes emerging in this area (according to R. Brinkman).

The second stage - the perioceanic - began with the fact that the continental structure of the Mediterranean was cut obliquely from the west by the Tethys fault. The narrow oceanic space began to gradually wedged from west to east, towards the central part of Europe: Western Tethys began to form, cutting off a vast territory - Vestgeya, which included Western Europe, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and the current western part of the Mediterranean Sea, which was first land, and then shallow sea with lagoons cut into the continent. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous period, there was a further expansion of Tethys, the dismemberment of Westgea into separate blocks and microcontinents, and at the beginning of our, Cenozoic, era and in its middle, “the retreat of the sea from the vast oceanic spaces of the Western Tethys or its localization in narrow and deeply protruding into the continent” took place. bays such as Aquitaine or Aragon, from where the sea is then also pushed back by the accumulation of thick coarse clastic strata of continental genesis. At the same time, the mountain ranges of Europe and North Africa are uplifting - the Alps, the Balkans, the Atlas, the Pyrenees, etc.

The third - pre-Mediterranean - stage ended about 6 million years ago. At this time, significant areas of the ancient Mediterranean basin either became dry land, or, on the contrary, the sea advanced on the lands surrounding it. The channels connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic through the Strait of Beth and the Rif, which existed on the site of the current Balearic Islands and Morocco, as well as the straits connecting it with the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea, were closed. Communication with other water basins was carried out only through the narrow Strait of Gibraltar. And when it was also closed off, the Mediterranean Sea became a closed water basin... which dried up in a period of time that, in terms of geologists, is an instant - in some thousand years. Then, after the breakthrough of the bridge separating the waters of the Atlantic from the Mediterranean Sea, the "bath" of the Mediterranean filled up for even more a short time- in just over a century. And such drainage and filling of the giant "bath" occurred not once, not twice, but at least 40 times within half a million years!

“The idea of ​​the complete and repeated drying up of a vast sea basin, at first glance, seems fantastic,” writes the famous Soviet oceanologist A. S. Monin in his book Popular History of the Earth. - However, the authors of this idea, the Swiss geologist K. Hsu and the Italian foraminiferal specialist M. Chita, rejected other possible hypotheses about the origin of the Mediterranean evaporite layer and ended their article in the report on the 13th cruise of the Glomar Challenger with the following statement by Sherlock Holmes: “If you excluded the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

What kind of evaporite layer is this, which forced to put forward a fantastic - and nevertheless the only acceptable one! - the hypothesis of repeated drying and subsequent filling of the "bath" of the Mediterranean? Let us again give the floor to Professor A. S. Monin.

In the 60s of the current century, by seismic profiling in the rocks of the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, under a layer of loose sediments several hundred meters thick, a thick (about two kilometers!) Layer was found almost everywhere, which reflects sound waves well, that is, composed of very hard rocks. This layer was called "reflector M". In 1970, on the 13th voyage of the Glomar Challenger, it was possible to drill wells at the bottom that reached the “M reflector” in various areas of the Mediterranean Sea. It turned out that this layer was formed by evaporites - sedimentary rocks formed as a result of evaporation of water in salty shallow waters. The geological age of the lower and upper boundaries of the "M reflector" was estimated at 6 and 5.5 million years.

“The most natural hypothesis about the origin of the evaporite layer seems to be the complete drying up of the Mediterranean Sea due to the closure of the Strait of Gibraltar (at the current evaporation rate, minus precipitation and river runoff - about 3000 km³ / year - this would take only about 1000 years), writes Monin. - At the same time, the Mediterranean Sea turned into a huge basin 2-3 km deep with small drying salt lakes at the bottom. Under these conditions, anhydrite concretions found in drilling cores were formed, which precipitated out of solutions only at temperatures above 35 °C, shallow-water dolomite stromatolites, gravel from grains of ocean basalt, hardened silt and gypsum with unusual dwarf mollusk shells, salt-filled cracks in the dried mud. Above and below the evaporites, as well as in the layers between them, ordinary deep ocean sediments were found.

These "oceanic" layers indicate that the Mediterranean Sea has dried up repeatedly. A simple calculation speaks of the same: a two-kilometer layer of evaporites (and in some places even thicker) could not have been formed in a single “evaporation” of the Mediterranean “bath” (it has been calculated that if the modern Mediterranean Sea is evaporated, then at the bottom there will be a layer of salt with a thickness of only only 20-30 meters). Various researchers, relying on various assumptions associated with the "evaporite phenomenon", name a different number of fillings and dryings of the "bath" of the Mediterranean - from several times to several tens of times. The rates of these fillings and dryings are also determined differently - from 100 to 2000 years. But be that as it may, it is clear that these rates - on the scale of the history of the planet - were catastrophic, and such catastrophes happened more than once. They had a truly planetary influence.

Seven million years ago, the geography of Europe was completely different than it is now. Most of Eastern Europe was occupied by a huge lake with fresh or brackish water. French geologists call it Lac-Mer (lake-sea). The Mediterranean Sea at that time was already separated from the Atlantic Ocean, dried up a lot and formed a number of large continental lakes. Rising at about the same time, the Carpathians formed a barrier that deprived the Mediterranean of the inflow of water from Lac-Mer. The Mediterranean basin has turned into a huge desert.

Firstly, the evaporated water of the Mediterranean Sea could not disappear without a trace. Through atmospheric precipitation, it entered the World Ocean, and its level rose by 12 meters, which caused a "global flood". Secondly, the salt withdrawn from the World Ocean and used to form a two-kilometer thickness of the evaporite layer lowered its salinity by 10 ‰, which, of course, could not but affect the inhabitants of the ocean. The draining of the giant “bath” caused serious changes in the climate of Europe and North Africa, as well as in the relief of the lands surrounding this “bath”. Rivers that once flowed into the sea began to flow into a deep hole, cutting through canyons now hidden under water. Such submarine canyons were discovered already before deep drilling brought the "evaporite sensation". For example, under the modern delta of the Rhone River, an underwater canyon several hundred meters deep was discovered long ago: it stretched along the continental slope for 240 kilometers. A similar canyon with a depth of over 1200 meters under the bed of the Nile was found at the end of the 60s by the Soviet geologist I.S. And then it turned out that along the entire perimeter of the Mediterranean Sea, majestic underwater canyons are cut into the continental slope - continuations of modern rivers.

The upper reaches of the river valleys of the Mediterranean region adjacent to the Alps were considered a classic example of how glaciers "plow" their way through mountain ranges. The appearance of lakes in the Alps was also attributed to glaciers. However, as L. A. Smith notes in an article published in the journal Geotimes, new research on the evaporite phenomenon “completely shatters the textbook theories on the origin of the Alpine lakes” and the upper reaches of the river valleys facing the Mediterranean Sea. . For the main valleys of this zone were formed not by glaciers, but during the epoch of the Mediterranean "bath" drying up. The bottom of this "bath", devoid of billions of tons of water that pressed on it, rose at least a few hundred meters (if not a kilometer). And, of course, with the draining of the Mediterranean Sea, the climate of Europe has changed dramatically.

In the north and in the center of Europe, palm trees bloom and bear fruit. Herds of ostriches and mastodons roam its savannahs, European rivers are teeming with crocodiles. And between Europe and Africa there is a hot, waterless desert, covered with a thin crust of salt, gravel rolled by the sea surf and skeletons of the inhabitants of the former Mediterranean Sea ... Scientists paint such a picture in the light of the latest discoveries made at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The fact that 5–6 million years ago there was an "African climate" in Europe has long been known - from the finds of petrified palm trees, the remains of crocodiles and other tropical animals. But only the “evaporite phenomenon” made it possible to explain the reason for the drying up and warming of the climate. When the waters of the Atlantic finally filled the Mediterranean "bath", the climate of Europe became cool and humid, which ultimately led to the great glaciations.

About 5 million years ago, with the final opening of the Strait of Gibraltar, the actual history of the Mediterranean begins. A stable connection with the ocean through the strait was maintained, as shown by the latest research, throughout all these 5 million years. So the reports of Arab geographers that the kings of Egypt were responsible for filling the "bath" of the Mediterranean Sea should be attributed to the realm of myths. And the statements of scientists of antiquity about the breakthrough of the Isthmus of Gibraltar, which separated the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean Sea, should be included in the field of brilliant conjectures. We, armed with the achievements of science of the 20th century, learned about this only quite recently; the technical equipment of ancient science was much more modest, and eyewitnesses of the breakthrough of the Atlantic waters into the Mediterranean "bath" 5 million years ago could only be great apes that inhabited at that time the tropical forests that covered Southern Europe and North Africa. But at another breakthrough, connected with the waters of the Mediterranean, eyewitnesses could be: this breakthrough was the invasion of the salty waters of the Mediterranean Sea into the fresher waters of the Black Sea and the associated flooding of the Bosphorus, a land bridge that existed on the site of the current Bosphorus, Dardanelles and the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bMarmara.

Pliny the Elder calls the Sea of ​​Marmara the Hellespont and the Dardanelles the Propontis. “The ocean is not satisfied with the erosion of the land and the demolition of part of it, thereby increasing the empty spaces,” he writes in his Natural History. - It was not enough for him to break through the washed-out mountains and, tearing Calpe from Africa, absorb much more land than he left; it is not enough to merge through the Hellespont into the Propontis, again swallowing the land. From the Bosporus, it again insatiably stretches out in another bulk, until the Meotian lake protruding from its banks tames its prey.

The ancient authors called the Sea of ​​Azov the Meotian Lake, the Black Sea - Pontus Euxinus, or simply Pontus. “It is believed that Pontus once looked like the Caspian Sea, that is, it was surrounded by land from everywhere, and that it subsequently broke through the Hellespont into the Mediterranean Sea,” Strabo writes in his Geography.

The mention of the breakthrough of the waters of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean (for Pontus Euxinus, together with the Meotian Lake, was considered by the ancients as the "mother of the sea"), we find in many other scientists of the era of antiquity. They go back to the legend of the flood that occurred during the reign of King Dardanus, the son of Zeus and Electra, the ancestor of the Dardani, a people who lived in the region of Troy. At first, Dardanus lived in Arcadia, the mainland of Hellas, then moved to the island of Samothrace, where he was overtaken by a flood. When the water subsided, Dardan moved to Asia Minor, founded a city at the foot of Mount Ida, gave rise to the dynasty of the kings of Troy - the Dardanides - and the name of the strait, which is known as the Dardanelles.

Many ancient authors speak of the Dardanian Flood (as well as the Ogyges Flood that preceded it and the later Deucalion Flood). For example, Diodorus Siculus reports that the inhabitants of the island of Samothrace “tell that before the flood, the memory of which was preserved among the ancient peoples, there was another flood, much more significant, through a breakthrough of land near the islands of Kianii (at the mouth of the Bosphorus into the Black Sea), a breakthrough that formed first the Bosporus, and later the Hellespont. At this time, the sea flooded a large expanse of the mainland of Asia and the low valleys of Samothrace.

We find an echo of this myth in the works of Arab geographers and even in the writings of the great Khorezmian Biruni, an astronomer, philosopher, geographer, ethnographer, historian, contemporary and friend of another scientist-encyclopedist of the Middle Ages - Avicenna. Biruni reports that “once between Alexandria and Constantinople there was a salty and stinking land, on which, however, fig and sycamore trees were planted. The Greeks lived on this land when Alexander the Two-horned leveled the mountain that separated the Colzum Sea from the Rum Sea. Then all this land was swallowed up by the Colsum Sea.

Let's decipher this information Biruni. The Rum Sea is the Mediterranean, and Kolzum is the Black Sea, Alexander (Iskander) the Two-horned was called Alexander the Great in the East, attributing to him deeds similar to those attributed to Hercules by the Hellenes. Only Hercules, according to the myths, made a breakthrough of the Isthmus of Gibraltar, which separated the waters of the Atlantic from the Mediterranean Sea, and Alexander the Two-horned - a breakthrough of the land bridge that separated the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Such a bridge actually existed. Moreover, as in the case of the Gibraltar breakthrough, the Bosphorus breakthrough has repeatedly occurred. Only the breakthrough of the Bosphorus occurred at a time much later than the breakthrough of Gibraltar.

At the end of the 19th century, the Russian geologist N. I. Andrusov discovered that the level of the Black Sea in past epochs changed dramatically, and the amplitude of the fluctuations had a range of many hundreds of meters. Following Andrusov, many Russian and Soviet scientists took up the history of the Black Sea basin. Its origin (as well as the origin of the Mediterranean Sea) is still controversial to this day. But the history of the Black Sea over the past 700 thousand years has been restored in its main features.

Seven hundred thousand years ago, there was no connection between the Black and Mediterranean Seas; there was a land bridge in the place of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. This stage in the development of the Black Sea basin is called Chaudinsky - after Cape Chauda, ​​located on the southern coast of the Kerch Peninsula, where typical deposits of the oldest known stage in the history of the Black Sea were found. The salinity of the waters of the Chaudinsky basin was only 12–14‰ due to the fact that it was cut off from the salty waters of the Mediterranean Sea, where salinity ranges from 30 to 39.6‰, and in the modern Black Sea it varies within 15– eighteen‰. Traces of the former level of the Black Sea basin have been preserved in the form of terraces raised to a height of 100-110 meters in the area of ​​present-day Gelendzhik, as well as on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia.

Approximately 370 thousand years ago, the so-called Sukhumi period in the history of the Black Sea began - its water area through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles connected with the Mediterranean Sea. About 200 thousand years ago, the “valve” of the Bosphorus closed again, separating these seas, and the so-called Ancient Euxinian basin was formed. Its waters, like the waters of the Chaudinsky basin, were fresher than the current waters of the Black Sea, and even more so the Mediterranean. “Traces of the ancient Euxinian brackish basin are found almost on the entire Black Sea coast,” Bulgarian scientists write in the monographic collection Black Sea, the Russian translation of which was published by Gidrometeoizdat in 1983. - On the Caucasian coast, the ancient Euxinian terrace, 55–90 m high, is dated from the remains of animals, and in Colchis, near the mouth of the Rioni River, this terrace was found at a depth of 190 m. Near the city of Nikolaev, it is located at a depth of 20 m. On the Bulgarian Black Sea coast its height is 55–60 m above sea level.”

The ancient Euxinian basin existed for a relatively short time, because 175 thousand years ago the Bosphorus again became the bottom of the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, the salty waters of the Mediterranean Sea penetrated into the Black Sea and the so-called Uzunlar period in the development of the Black Sea basin began. The terraces of this period are raised 40–45 meters above the current sea level on the coast of the Caucasus and 30–40 meters on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. The waters of the Mediterranean Sea salted the Uzunlar basin. Moreover, representatives of the “freshwater” ancient Euxinian fauna lived in the northern part, which was not so saline, while in the southern part of the Uzunlar basin, where the waters of the Mediterranean Sea constantly arrived, animals living in salty ocean water appeared.

About 115 thousand years ago, a land bridge - the Bosphorus - again separated the Black and Mediterranean Seas. And 100 thousand years ago, it disappeared again, and the next stage in the history of the Black Sea basin began - Karangat (along Cape Karangat on the Kerch Peninsula, where marine deposits of this period were first discovered). The Karangat basin sharply salinizes - up to 22‰, typical representatives of the fauna of the Mediterranean Sea with its salty water settle in it. 70 thousand years ago, the Bosphorus bridge reappears: after all, at that time the level of the World Ocean dropped sharply due to glaciers that bound huge masses of water. About 50 thousand years ago, in the so-called Surozh period of the development of the Black Sea basin, probably due to the onset of warming and melting of glaciers, the connection between the Black and Mediterranean Seas was restored for the umpteenth time. About 30 thousand years ago in last time the Bosphorus appears and the "valve" of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles closes. The salinity of the waters of this basin, called Novoevksinsky, decreases, the sea level drops sharply: on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, river valleys were found, deepened by 25–30 meters, and on the coast of the Caucasus - by 40–50 and even 100 meters. The Don River flowed along the bottom of the current Sea of ​​​​Azov, which at that time became dry land, and the present Kerch Strait was its channel.

When did the land bridge disappear and the current Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, the Sea of ​​Marmara, as well as the modern Black Sea basin formed? According to some estimates, the breakthrough of the Mediterranean waters into the Black Sea occurred 10 thousand years ago, according to others - 8000-9000, third researchers believe that modern stage in the history of the Black Sea basin began only 5000 years ago. But whichever of these datings is accepted, it is obvious that at that time people already lived in the Caucasus, and in the Balkans, and in Asia Minor, and in Greece, and on the islands of the Aegean Sea. It was at that time that here, on the shores washed by the waters of the Aegean and Black Seas, the foundations of European civilization were laid, the population switched to a settled way of life, the Old Stone Age, the Paleolithic, gave way to the New Stone Age, the Neolithic, with its agricultural culture, the construction of buildings, etc. e. And didn’t the later myths about the Dardanus Flood reflect the real events that took place 5000-10,000 years ago in connection with the flooding of the Bosphorus? The Bosphorus is narrow - only 700 meters, its greatest depth is 120 meters. The maximum depth of the Dardanelles is even less - 105 meters. And since the level of the World Ocean in the era of glaciation was lower than the current one by more than 100 meters, it is obvious that during periods of low standing of its waters, there was land on the site of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. But, as we said above, the “barrier” between the Mediterranean and Black Seas arose and collapsed not once, but at least five times. Was it always connected with fluctuations in the level of the World Ocean? For example, the last time, 5,000-10,000 years ago, its level was not so much higher than the current one, because the bulk of the ice had already melted by that time (10 thousand years ago, the level of the World Ocean was only 20-30 meters lower than the current one, and 6,000 years ago, the modern coastline was formed).

A number of scientists believe that the last breakthrough and death of the Bosphorus were not caused by the melting of glaciers, but by other reasons - tectonic movements of the earth's crust. In other words, there was not a slow flood that occurred over centuries and millennia due to the melting of ice, but a catastrophic flood. There is a hypothesis according to which, as a result of movements of the earth's crust, not only the Bosphorus, a small piece of land, which has now become the bottom of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, has gone under water, but also Pontida, a vast land that existed in even more ancient time in place of the Black Sea. Its last remnant is the mountainous part of the south of the Crimean peninsula.

“Before us is a breathtaking fantastic cliff of the main massif of Karadag, completely sheer into the sea ... It is impossible to describe this suddenly opened picture in human words. Moreover, it is impossible to fully accommodate it in your imagination. It is perceived gradually and in parts. The notion of the theater becomes especially relevant here. Before us are some surreal and sinister scenery, designed and built by the hands of the devil.

But why be surprised? After all, Karadag is an ancient volcano that erupted lava over a hundred million years ago, at the height of the Jurassic period. What could be grander and more terrible in the world than the contemplation of an erupting volcano! Even if it is frozen and petrified... But Karadag has one feature that sharply distinguishes it from all volcanoes known in the past and present. 60 million years ago, a giant fault passed through the Crimean coast. It was one of the most significant world catastrophes discovered by people in the past of their planet. Evidence of this drop is a kilometer-long cliff of Yaila on the southern coast of Crimea, a grandiose sheer cut of Karadag. So, the difference between Karadag and the vast majority of other living and dead volcanoes on the planet is that it is a volcano in the section: half of it remained standing on land, and half disappeared under water. Karadag is a huge anatomical theater of nature, and there is probably nothing like it anywhere else.”

So poetically describes Karadag in the book “Journey to the Blue Country” by G.E. Shulman (and before him, Pushkin and Voloshin, Aivazovsky and Bogaevsky, Paustovsky and Ehrenburg devoted their lines, sketches and paintings to Karadag). Karadag was studied by such geologists as A. E. Fersman and A. P. Pavlov, V. P. Zenkovich, the most prominent specialist in sea coasts, and other well-known scientists. And many of them came up with the idea that Karadag and the entire mountainous Crimea, which is so sharply different from the steppe part of the peninsula, are not the last remnant of the “Black Sea Atlantis” - Pontida, which once stretched from the coast of Crimea to the Turkish coast of the Black Sea?

Pontida, as considered by the greatest authorities in geology of the late XIX - early XX centuries E. Suess, F. Oswald, the best expert on the Black Sea N. I. Andrusov, and later the president of the Geographical Society Academician L. S. Berg, the greatest Soviet zoogeographer Professor I. I. Puzanov and a number of other specialists in the field of geology, oceanology, zoogeography, existed on the site of the Black Sea basin until the end of the Pliocene, that is, about one or two million years ago. The mountainous Crimea at that time was the northernmost outskirts of Pontida and was connected by mainland land not only with Asia Minor, but also with the Balkan Peninsula and the Caucasus.

In favor of this hypothesis, its supporters cited interesting facts related not only to the geology of the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Asia Minor, but also to the specific fauna and flora of the Crimean Peninsula. For, as Professor N. I. Rubtsov writes in the article “Pontida”, published in the journal “Nature” in the early 60s, “when studying the geographical ranges of species of the Crimean fauna and flora, numerous, very interesting facts are revealed, which can be satisfactorily explained , only if we assume that until recently the Crimea was directly connected with the countries now separated by the Black Sea, that is, with Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula and the Caucasus.

The first idea that the flora and fauna of the Crimea are the remains of the fauna and flora of the sunken Pontida was expressed back in 1915 by S. A. Mokrzhetsky. Ten years later, I. I. Puzanov cited a number of data indicating the relationship of the terrestrial mollusks of the Crimea with the mollusks of Asia Minor and Transcaucasia, explaining it by the recent land connection of these regions, between which the Black Sea now lies. Further analysis showed that relatives of these mollusks also live on the Balkan Peninsula. Summing up the results of many years of research on the origin of the Crimean flora, the largest Soviet botanist E.F. Vulf came to the conclusion that the main elements of the Crimean flora were formed at a time when the Crimea was the outskirts of a vast land that occupied the place of the Black Sea and sank at the beginning of the Quaternary period. “At present, biogeographical facts testifying to the past, continental connections of the Crimea continue to increase due to further, ever wider and more detailed study of the flora and fauna of the Crimea and the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean,” notes Professor N. I. Rubtsov and cites some examples from these facts.

The remarkable Crimean orchid - the “Company of Taurica”, differs from its orchid sisters in its original flower, except for the Crimea itself, it is found only in the south of Asia Minor and in Turkish Kurdistan. A whole series of plant species links the Crimea with Asia Minor through the Balkan Peninsula or western Transcaucasia. Among the common Crimean-Balkan-Asia Minor and Crimean-Caucasian-Asia Minor elements there are representatives of rosaceous and cruciferous, legume and cereal, lily and other families that form the flora of Crimea. “Thus,” Rubtsov states, “as a result, a very extensive group of species is revealed with areas that completely or partially surround the Black Sea and, as it were, link the countries that are now separated by this sea.”

Data on the Crimean fauna also speak in favor of the former existence of Pontida. For example, the large blue-violet Crimean ground beetle is closely related to the ground beetle that lives in the Balkans. Dragonflies of the Crimea have closest relatives in Transcaucasia and Asia Minor. Among the reptiles, the Crimean lizard and the gecko are well known, whose relatives live in the Balkans and the Caucasus. In the peculiar fauna of the Crimea, there are a lot of Mediterranean species: horseshoe bat, leopard snake, yellowfin, cicadas, praying mantises, centipedes, scorpions, phalanxes. According to a number of zoologists, these species settled in the Crimea even in the era of the existence of Pontida, and later, after the death of the "Black Sea Atlantis", the fauna and flora of Crimea began to acquire an island character - until the mountainous island of Crimea merged with southwestern outskirts of the East European Plain and did not become a peninsula.

According to some researchers, in the era preceding the glaciations, the Crimean Mountains were a continuation of the Balkans, and the Crimea should have received the main core of its fauna from the Balkans. Professor I. I. Puzanov, having analyzed numerous data showing the relationship of the Crimean fauna with the fauna of the Balkans, Transcaucasia and Asia Minor, came to the conclusion in 1949 that the fauna of the Crimean Mountains or was created as a result of “the gradual settlement of a desert island raised from the depths of the sea , but came into temporary connection with the adjacent countries", or is it the remnant of "the once richer fauna that inhabited the now disintegrated significant landmass, a fragment of which is the Mountainous Crimea". According to Puzanov and other supporters of the existence of Pontida, the second assumption is correct. However, many facts obtained in recent years make us consider the first assumption to be true: the island of Crimea over the past thousand years has been repeatedly connected by land bridges to mainland lands.

And if we talk about Pontida not geological or zoogeographical, but historical, then we should first of all talk about the vast expanses of the Black Sea shelf. They were dry land in the era of the existence of Homo sapiens. And Paleolithic people lived on this land, starting with the Neanderthals (traces of which were found in the Crimean Mountains, along with the remains of a wild horse and a mammoth). Primitive people, who did not know navigation, undoubtedly got to the Crimea via land bridges from the regions of Transcaucasia, the Balkans or the southwestern outskirts of the East European Plain.

The shallow shelf zone occupies almost the entire northwestern part of the Black Sea and significant areas of the southwestern part (its area is almost a quarter of the Black Sea area). It ends at a depth of 90-110 meters with a continental slope, steeply leaving to the two-kilometer depths of the sea. In the era of the last glaciation, it was a plain along which rivers flowed, whose channels became underwater valleys that continue the valleys of modern land rivers.

In the north-west of the Black Sea, where the mighty rivers Danube, Dniester, Southern Bug, Dnieper flow into, the width of the shelf reaches 200 and even 250 kilometers (off the coast of Asia Minor and the Caucasus, it is only a few kilometers, or even hundreds of meters). Once these rivers formed a single system - the Paleo-Danube, primitive people lived on the banks of the Paleo-Danubian rivers. Their sites are found on land, but they can also be on the shelf of the Black Sea.

Pontida is geological, the land that existed on the site of the Black Sea and connected the Crimean Mountains with Asia Minor, if it existed, then its death occurred long before the advent of Homo sapiens, and long before the onset of the modern Cenozoic era - tens of millions of years ago. Mountainous Crimea, which had been an island for a long time, about 10 million years ago began to be inhabited by terrestrial animals and plants through land bridges that either appeared or disappeared again. These bridges connected it not only with mainland Ukraine, but also with the north of the Balkan Peninsula, which determined the originality of the Crimean fauna and flora. (“In the middle of the Miocene, the Crimean Mountains was a small Tauride Island, on which the complex of animals and plants that inhabited it continued to develop,” writes M.V. the island reconnected with mainland Ukraine, and its fauna and flora undoubtedly replenished. In particular, at that time the Sevastopol fauna of mammals appeared here. Then, in the Pliocene, the flora and fauna of Crimea developed for a long time on the island, which sometimes again turned into a peninsula, At the same time, the sea separated it from the Caucasus and the Balkans... During the period of maximum glaciation of the Russian Plain in the middle of the Quaternary period, the climate in Crimea, except for the southern coast, was undoubtedly cold.Northern forms of animals and plants appeared here, the remains of which are found at the sites of ancient man.However, within the strip of the South Bank, they could save are local, however, more severe than now, climatic conditions, so part of the Mediterranean fauna and flora survived here.")

Thus, zoogeographic Pontida is land bridges that connected the Tauride Island - the present Mountainous Crimea - with the surrounding mainland lands over the past ten million years. Finally, the historical Pontida is the shelf of the Black Sea, especially its northwestern part, which is still experiencing submergence. spanning centuries and even millennia. However, individual sections of the historical Pontida could sink to the bottom very quickly - as a result of tectonic processes, primarily earthquakes. The fact that the shores of the Black Sea could sink after earthquakes is evidenced by sections of the shelf located at depths of up to 200 meters - undoubtedly, there was a sinking of the earth's crust. Perhaps not only the sites of primitive people, but also the flooded ancient city, the last remnant of Pontida, can be found at the bottom of the Black Sea. More precisely, at the bottom of the Sukhumi Bay, where for more than a hundred years the search for the legendary Dioscuria, founded by the Argonauts Castor and Polideuces, twin brothers, has been going on.

Starting from the IV century BC. e. Dioscuria is reported not only by myths, but also by ancient geographers and historians. This port city, as geographers and archaeologists of our days managed to prove, was located on the shore of the Sukhumi Bay. On the site of ancient Dioscuria, the Roman city of Sebastopolis arose, the ruins of which were found not only on land, but also at the bottom of the Sukhumi Bay. But neither on land nor under water for a long time it was possible to find traces of Dioscuria, despite all the searches of archaeologists and scuba divers. Meanwhile, finds made under water, for example, a tombstone of the 5th century BC. e., ancient Greek ceramics, etc., they said that at the bottom of the Sukhum Bay lies not only the Roman Sebastopolis, but also the Hellenic Dioscuria. Perhaps the remains of Dioscuria are in an underwater canyon that is deeply cut into the bottom of the Sukhumi Bay, and therefore they are inaccessible to researchers? “The city lying at the bottom of the sea has not yet revealed all its secrets,” writes the famous Abkhaz local historian and historian Vianor Pachulia. - The researchers paid attention to the fact that the bottom of the Sukhumi Bay is characterized by a sharp increase in depth. Already at a distance of 500–600 meters from the shore, the depth exceeds 100 meters and is therefore inaccessible to scuba divers, while northwest of Sukhumi the bottom drops very gently. Such a sharp lowering of the bottom in the bay involuntarily suggests: is it not the result of a catastrophe caused by tectonic causes? Did this catastrophe occur on the threshold of our reckoning? In the Abkhaz legends, vague memories of some kind of earthquake and the absorption of the city of foreign aliens by the sea have been preserved. According to the archaeologist L.N. Solovyov, Dioscuria went under water when the shore was lowered or was buried by a landslide.

However, most modern researchers are very skeptical of the hypotheses put forward by Pachulia and Solovyov. No traces of Dioscuria were found at the bottom of the Sukhumi Canyon. On the other hand, many finds on land, on the shores of the Sukhumi Bay, indicate that, apparently, this Hellenic city of the Dioscuri twins did not die from a catastrophic failure. The underwater finds made near the shore cannot serve as convincing evidence in favor of the existence of the "Sukhumi Atlantis": the objects found may also be cargo from a sunken ship and fall into the water due to destructive action waves washing away the shores of the Sukhumi Bay (during storms in the last century, the sea threw onto the shores of the bay not only ceramics and stones hewn by builders, but also coins, valuable jewelry and even gold items - but perhaps it was not raised from the bottom , but just washed out by the waves on the shore?) So the question of the death of Dioscuria remains open - and many archaeologists, geologists, geomorphologists believe that it is time to close it already. Undoubted, however, is the fact that at the bottom of the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait lie the ruins of many ancient cities and settlements - the remains of the "historical Pontida" lying on the shelf.

The first settlement of the colonists, who arrived from the shores of Hellas to the shores of Pontus Euxinus, was founded on an island lying opposite the Dnieper-Bug Estuary, in the northwestern corner of the Black Sea. This was in the 7th century BC. e., and then it was, in fact, not an island, but a peninsula. But the sea advanced, washed away the land, and the peninsula turned into an island - the Greeks called it Alsos. At that time it was three times longer and seven times wider than the current island in the estuary.

To this day, the Black Sea annually robs the island of up to half a meter of land. The settlement, founded by the ancient Greeks, almost completely went under water. That is why excavations on the island, which until recently was called Berezan, and now bears the name of Schmidt (in 1906, Lieutenant P.P. Schmidt and other participants in the uprising of the Black Sea Fleet were shot here), archaeologists are conducting not only in the ground, but also under water .

Underwater archaeological research of the "shelf Pontida" in our country has been going on for more than a dozen years. Back in 1905, engineer L.P. Kolli studied an ancient pier built by Greek colonists at the bottom of the Feodosiya Bay. He published the results of his search in the article “Traces of ancient culture at the bottom of the sea. The current state of the issue of finding ancient monuments in the sea” (it appeared in the “Izvestia of the Tauride Archival Commission” for 1909). In the 1930s, under the guidance of Professor R. A. Orbeli, underwater archaeological work was carried out related to the study of the sunken cities of Pontida. But the real excavations of archaeologists-submariners unfolded only after scuba gear was taken into service. From the summer of 1957 to this day, expeditions have been searching underwater. And every season they open new buildings, piers and other buildings of the era of antiquity, flooded by the waters of the Black Sea.

"Russian Troy" is sometimes called the ancient city of Chersonese Tauride, the ruins of which lie in the vicinity of modern Sevastopol. Archaeologists have found fortifications with towers and gates, a water supply system with ceramic pipes, in the city of the dead" - a necropolis, a plate with an inscription - an oath of the inhabitants of Chersonesos to the republic, an ancient temple, residential buildings, beautiful frescoes. During the excavations, it turned out that a large quarter of Chersonesos went to the bottom of the Quarantine Bay. During the excavations of another ancient city, which lies not far from the present port of Nikolaev - Olbia, not a quarter, but more than half of the huge ancient city was found under water.

The excavations of Olbia began in the last century and continue to this day. Only now, more and more often, the search for archaeologists is conducted not in the ground, but under water. It was started by Epron divers under the leadership of R. A. Orbeli at the end of the 30s, and scuba divers continued under the direction of V. D. Blavatsky. The baton of research from them was taken over by the Olbia Underwater Archaeological Expedition, organized by the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. In her work, for the first time in the practice of underwater archaeologists, a sound geolocator was used, which makes it possible to probe not only the water column, but also a multi-meter layer of sediments lying on the bottom, hiding ancient monuments.

Several ancient cities, discovered by archaeologists on land, have their continuation at the bottom of the Kerch Strait. Under the water is the ancient mole of Panticapaeum - the capital of the Bosporan kingdom, the largest city in the Black Sea region (in its place is the current city of Kerch). Opposite Panticapaeum, on the other, eastern side of the Kerch Strait, lie the ruins of Phanagoria, the rival of Panticapaeum. The main part of the "capital of the Asian Bosporus", as Phanagoria was called, was flooded. Powerful defensive walls went under the water, a three-meter layer of water hides the cobblestone pavement of the city. The waters of the Kerch Strait also hide the ruins of ancient buildings: they have swallowed up 17 hectares of the famous Phanagoria!

On the Taman Peninsula, not far from Phanagoria, there is Taman, famous by Lermontov. On the site of the present Taman in the early Middle Ages was the ancient city of Tmutarakan, with which the history of Kievan Rus is closely connected, and in the ancient era there was the city of Germonassa. The waters of the Taman Bay gradually undermined the steep bank on which Hermonassa stood. Buildings from the times of antiquity collapsed into the water, many buildings of Tmutarakan also sank. Archaeologists will have to study under water the remains of two cities - ancient and medieval. Not far from Taman, submarine archaeologists have discovered a continuation of the ancient settlement of Karakondam, part of which is also swallowed up by the sea.

In the early 1980s, Kerch submariners led by A.N. Shamray, who was part of the Bosporus underwater archaeological team led by K.K. Shilik and A.N. Shamray, managed to make a unique find at the bottom of the Kerch Strait, not far from Cape Takil, - a well abandoned almost 2000 years ago, and then gone to the bottom. Archaeologists got a rare opportunity to explore an undamaged cultural complex dating back to a limited period of time (wells, after they ran out of water, were usually used by residents as a kind of garbage pit, where they dumped unusable dishes, leftover food, damaged objects made of metal, wood, etc. .p., - such a hole was filled very quickly). From the bottom of the well, almost complete antique amphoras with hallmarks, various kinds of miniature vessels, wood and bone items were raised. Near the well, the ruins of a wall, some kind of structure resembling a dilapidated tower, ancient anchors, possibly marking the boundaries of the ancient Greek port of Acre, which ancient geographers speak of, were found. The first exploratory excavations on land, near the finds under water, showed that traces of ancient settlement.

Probably, the time is not far off when another one will be added to the list of cities of antiquity, partly buried in the ground, and partly submerged under water - Acre, another settlement of "Pontida on the shelf".

The level of the Black Sea, even after it reconnected with the Mediterranean 5,000-10,000 years ago, fluctuates, either rising by several meters or lowering. About 4000-5000 years before our days, the level of the Black Sea was about 2-2.5 meters higher than the current one (the so-called Novochernomorskaya transgression - the advance of the sea). About 2500 years ago, during the era of Greek colonization of the shores of Pontus Euxinus, the level of the Black Sea, on the contrary, was 6–8 meters lower than the present one. At that time, the Hellenes built their settlements and cities on the banks of the Pontus, which now turned out not only underground, but also under water as a result of the Nymphean transgression (about a thousand years ago), and then the modern transgression, which began in the XIII-XV centuries and continues to this day (according to forecasts, it should stop only in the XXIII-XXV centuries of our era).

At the bottom of the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black and Azov Seas, the ruins of ancient cities have been found. An ancient settlement was also found in the Sea of ​​Azov itself, at the bottom of the Taganrog Bay. In the era of the last glaciation, the powerful Paleodon River flowed where the bottom of the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov is now, and flowed into the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait, which at that time was not a strait, but the channel of Paleodon. And if the ancient Greeks called the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov Meotida - a lake or a sea (and the Romans called it the Meotian swamp), then we have the right to talk about Meotida - the land that went to the bottom of this sea, about its flooded cities, settlements of antiquity and the sites of primitive people, related to the Ice Age.

The Sea of ​​Azov is surprisingly shallow, its maximum depth is only 14 meters. It would seem obvious that during the era of glaciation, when the level of the World Ocean was more than 100 meters lower than the current one, there was no Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov and in its place there was solid land. However, the history of Meotida is not so simple, it is connected with the history of the ancient seas, including the Tethys Sea.

The Mediterranean Sea is essentially a giant bay of the Atlantic Ocean. It has its own huge bay - the Black Sea, which communicates with it through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, straits that have appeared relatively recently (the Bosphorus was once a river that communicated with a lake that was on the site of the Sea of ​​​​Marmara, and turned into a strait only 5000-10 000 years ago). The Black Sea has its own bay - the Sea of ​​Azov, which also communicates with the Black Sea through the strait, which was once the bed of the Don paleo-river. The Sea of ​​Azov has its own bays, and the most amazing of them is Kazantip Bay. For it is the lagoon of an atoll, like those that now exist only in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Only Kazantip Atoll is formed not by corals, but by bryozoans, tiny invertebrates that form calcareous colonies, like corals. The atoll was formed tens of millions of years ago, when the Sea of ​​Azov was part of a giant water basin called the Sarmatian Sea-Lake.

10-12 million years ago, most of the current territory of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Austria, the southern part of Ukraine, the Caucasus and Transcaucasia were the bottom of the Sarmatian Sea, from which the current peaks of the Carpathians and the Caucasus Mountains rose as separate islands and peninsulas. The Danube flowed into the Sarmatian Sea somewhere in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bmodern Budapest, sea ​​waters reached the area of ​​present-day Vienna. About 10 million years ago, the Sarmatian Sea began to decrease in size, retreating to the east, and broke up into separate basins, the remains of which are the current Black, Caspian, Aral and Azov Seas. Studies by scientists, primarily domestic ones, have shown that there was a connection between the Azov, Black and Caspian Seas, which was interrupted relatively recently. When exactly - is unknown, because there are several different points of view on this issue. The Sea of ​​Azov was repeatedly connected with the Caspian through the Manych depression. Throughout almost the entire Quaternary period, the Manych was the channel of two rivers, whose upper reaches were connected by a chain of channels and shallow lakes. Movements of the earth's crust several times led to the Manych system sinking below sea level and filling with water, connecting the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov with the Caspian. According to the Soviet paleographer S. A. Kovalevsky, the last time this connection between the Sea of ​​Azov and the Caspian was interrupted only in the 4th century BC. e., shortly before the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

In the work “The Face of the Caspian Sea”, published in Baku in 1933, Kovalevsky argued, referring to ancient authors, that about 3500 years ago the Caspian Sea connected with the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov along the Manych Strait, and along the Volga valley extended north to the Baltic Sea, with which connected by a wide strait, and this situation persisted 2500 years ago. So, for example, Kovalevsky quotes the words of Strabo that “Jason, together with the Thessalian Armen, reached the Caspian Sea while sailing to Colchis” and concludes that in the time of the Argonauts, about 3400 years before our days, “the Manych Strait still existed , through which the excess waters of the Caspian, which was flowing, flowed down to the Aegean Sea, which was central for the Greeks.

The search for the strait connecting the Azov and Caspian Seas, at the direction of Alexander the Great, was to be taken up by a certain Heraclitus. But after the death of the great conqueror, this plan was not carried out. However, one of Alexander's successors, Seleucus Nicator, sent in the 80s of the III century BC. e. Sailing across the Caspian by Patroclus. According to Pliny, King Seleucus was going to connect the Caspian Sea with Meotida - the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov - with the help of a canal that was supposed to pass through the modern Manych lowland. And, perhaps, the construction of a canal will not be needed if Meotida and the Caspian are connected by a natural strait?

Strabo reports on the voyage of Patroclus across the Caspian Sea. But this information is very vague, as, indeed, many other reports of ancient authors about the Caspian Sea.

The Caspian Sea, located on the border of Europe and Asia, on all sides, like a lake, cut off by lands, with its salt water and seals, aroused surprise among ancient authors. Some considered it a bay of the Indian Ocean; others - by the bay of the North Sea, washing the Oikumene, the inhabited earth; still others believed that the Caspian was connected with Meotida - and thus with Pontus Euxinus; the fourth thought that the Caspian Sea is cut off from other seas and is a closed body of water; and such a major authority of the ancient era as Aristotle even speaks of two closed seas - the Caspian and the Hyrcanian, the shores of which are inhabited all around. The voyage of Patroclus did not bring clarity to this issue either.

“Although Patroclus undoubtedly did a good job, his voyage led him astray on the main issue,” writes the greatest expert in history. geographical discoveries Professor Richard Hennig. - Scientists have abandoned the correct point of view expressed by Herodotus a century and a half earlier that the Caspian Sea is a closed basin. With the exception of Ptolemy, almost all famous geographers of the subsequent era of antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the 16th century, when we meet this error for the last time at Ibn-Ayas, shared the idea that the Caspian Sea communicates with the ocean. For Patroclus informed Seleucus that the Caspian was not an independent sea, but a vast gulf of the ocean.

What made Patroclus come to this conclusion? According to some authors, having reached a narrow channel leading to the huge bay of Kara-Bogaz-Gol, with its very salty water, Patroclus considered it the beginning of the ocean. Other researchers believe that typical marine inhabitants - seals, abounding in the northern part of the Caspian Sea, led to the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe ocean of Patroclus. “Yes, and the huge bay in the northeast, which also extends far to the south, could inspire a sailor sailing along the coast with the erroneous idea that he was at the exit to the open ocean.” There are historians of geographical discoveries who believe that it is unlikely that Patroclus penetrated further north than the Absheron Peninsula, as evidenced by the ratio of the width and length of the Caspian cited by him, which is expressed respectively in figures of 5000 and 6000 stadia. According to S. A. Kovalevsky, the level of the Caspian in that era was much higher than now, and the Volga communicated with the Baltic Sea basin, and therefore it was possible, according to ancient legends and myths, to sail around Europe - from the Baltic to the Caspian, from Caspian to the Sea of ​​Azov and further to the Mediterranean and Atlantic Oceans. The fact that the level of the Caspian used to be higher is also evidenced by the indications of Pliny and Ptolemy, according to which the Arake River flowed into the Caspian Sea, connecting to the same with the Kura River.

How much higher was this level than now? The Caspian has been catastrophically shallow these days, but, as studies show, its level has been both higher than modern and lower than modern by several meters, and according to some sources - by several tens of meters.

In the Baku Bay, not far from the coast, half-submerged ruins were discovered at the beginning of the 18th century. “In the aforementioned Baku Bay, south of the city of Baki, 2 versts, at a depth of 4 sazhens, there is a stone structure, a wall-tower, and although it has already collapsed, there are signs in some places and above the water, and according to the news it is heard, allegedly in ancient times, the building was on a dry path and it was a guest yard, - wrote a Russian hydrograph and statesman F. I. Soymonov in 1723, exploring the shores of the Caspian Sea. But only in 1938-1940, when the level of the Caspian Sea dropped noticeably and the ruins came out of the water, Azerbaijani archaeologists were able to conduct a study of the structure, which was considered either a fortress, or a palace, or a caravanserai. It turned out that this is a temple of fire worshipers, erected, as the inscriptions on the slabs with which the temple is lined, were erected by the builder Zein-Ad-Dinben-Abu-Rashid from Shirvan in 1224-1235.

Derbent, a fortress city on the Caspian coast, has occupied a key strategic position since ancient times. Its powerful fortress walls saw the soldiers of Alexander the Great and Persian shahs, Arabs and Turks, Mongols and Russians. The Arab geographer Istakhri reports that at the beginning of the 10th century, "for six towers" the walls of Derbent were located in the water. According to the description of the Englishman Ch. Barrow, who visited Derbent in 1580, the ancient walls protruded into the sea "about half a mile", that is, almost 900 meters. The German scientist and traveler Adam Olearius, who visited Derbent in 1638, in his description of the "Muscovite and Persian lands" gives a drawing that clearly shows that the walls of Derbent continue into the sea. “Currently, the coastal part of the walls of the Derbent fortress at a distance of almost 300 m from the coast and the quarries located nearby are flooded by the sea,” write G. A. Razumov and M. F. Khasin in the book “Sinking Cities”. - The quarry and adits, where the stone was developed for the fortress, are now at a depth of 2 m. Even deeper, at 7 m, were found the ruins of an ancient port pier, built of the same hewn stone.

In the medieval manuscripts and folklore of Azerbaijan, one can find many legends, legends and myths about cities, fortresses, palaces and temples that sunk in “one terrible night”, including Yunnan Shahar, a “Greek city” that “was built Aristun, that is, Aristotle, the mentor of Alexander the Great. The city-fortress was also a port through which ships sailed from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, connected in the old days by the strait, which is now dry.

All attempts to find Yunnan Shahar at the bottom of the Caspian Sea were unsuccessful. But on the other hand, at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, archaeologists-submariners discovered a number of other sunken settlements. Medieval chronicles report that two caravan routes converged at the mouth of the Kura River, one of which went along the coast, and the second led to the mountains, to the fertile Shamakhi. At the crossroads of these trade routes, several cities arose, traces of which are beginning to be found not in the ground, but under water. In the late 60s - early 70s, the Museum of the History of Azerbaijan began research on the bottom of the Caspian Sea, two dozen kilometers north of the mouth of the Kura, which continues to this day. Along the coastline for several kilometers, bricks and tiles, a lot of ceramics were found. Medieval pottery was found even 3-4 kilometers from the coast, on the tops of underwater banks stretching along the coast of the village of Nord-Ost-Kultuk. And 10 kilometers from the coast, on the bank of the Pogorelaya Plate, from a depth of 4 meters, we managed to raise the neck of a large jug, densely overgrown with algae.

“Searchs at the bottom of the sea were carried out simultaneously with excavations on the shore,” says V. A. Kvachidze about the season of work in 1974. - As we expected, the sea receded in this place. Under the three-meter thickness of its deposits, we found a street of artisans: clay huts, ready-made dishes, pottery kilns, merchants' shops. The sunken seaport, apparently, is located at the bottom of the bay near Cape Amburaksky, in the north of the Absheron Peninsula, where medieval ceramics were raised from a depth of 10 meters. Apparently, future research will reveal more than one ancient city at the bottom of the Caspian Sea ... But why did the settlements end up under water - due to subsidence of the soil or fluctuations in the sea level itself?

Most modern researchers believe that the leading role in the fluctuations in the level of the Caspian Sea belongs not to the movements of the earth's crust, but to changes in the hydrological regime of the sea. And it is associated with climate change and the influx of the Volga water, which provides 80% of all river water entering the Caspian. “Some argue that the ruins of an ancient structure in the Baku Bay, the walls of the ancient Derbent fortress, the quarries located near these walls, were in the water due to some kind of tectonic catastrophe. This is unlikely, since in this case the walls must have experienced some kind of deformation. The study of these ruins shows that there are no traces of sudden destruction and that these buildings were gradually flooded with water, writes Professor KK Gul. - Therefore, tectonic causes can explain only the most insignificant lowering of the level. As for the level rise, it cannot be explained by tectonic causes at all, since if we assume that the level rise occurs due to periodic bottom rises, then for this there must be a change in direction or, as they say, the sign of movement throughout the entire Caspian basin. It has now been established that the direction of movement of the earth's crust in the region of the Caspian Sea (starting from the Quaternary period) has not changed; only lowering took place, but no uplift was observed.

Meanwhile, in medieval sources we find reports that the level of the Caspian began to rise sharply and its waters began to flood the coast. Based on the testimony of Istakhri about the six towers of Derbent standing in the water, the Russian researcher N. Khanykov in the middle of the 19th century came to the conclusion that at the beginning of the 10th century the level of the Caspian was about 8 meters higher than the current one. On the map of 1320, compiled by Mario Sanuto, near the western coast of the Caspian Sea there is an inscription: "The sea arrives every year on one palm, and many good cities have already been destroyed." The Muslim writer Nejati, who lived at the beginning of the 14th century, reports that in his time the sea swallowed up the port of Abeskun in the southwestern corner of the Caspian.

In the biography of one of the sheikhs, who died in 1300, it is said that at the beginning of the 14th century the sea threatened to flood the “blessed tomb”, flooding its environs “up to the foot of the mountains” in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bpresent Lankaran. The Muslim writer Bakuvi, a native of Baku, reports that in 1400! the sea flooded part of the towers and walls of Baku and approached the mosque. The Persian geographer Kazvini, in his essay “The Joy of Hearts”, written in 1339, not only reports on the flooding of the port of Abeskun, but also gives an explanation of the causes of the “flood”: the Jeyhun River, that is, the Amu Darya, which previously flowed into the Eastern (Aral) Sea, “About the time of the appearance of the Mongols, it changed its course and headed for the Khazar Sea,” that is, the Caspian.

Indeed, for three centuries, from the middle of the 13th century to the middle of the 16th century, the Amu Darya gave part of its waters not to the Aral Sea, but to the Caspian - academician L.S. historical time". But from the inflow of Amu Darya waters into the Caspian through the ancient riverbed - Uzboy - the sea level could rise slightly, almost by 1 centimeter per year. Therefore, Berg notes, the reason for the rise in the level of the Caspian in that era was not in the inflow of water through the ancient Uzboi, but in other factors - first of all, in the abundance of winter precipitation in the Caspian Sea basin and the exceptionally abundant watering of the Volga, which received the main mass of water from melting snow. that fell in its upper reaches and in the Kama basin. Moreover, Academician L. S. Berg noted the relationship between the level of the Caspian Sea and the conditions of navigation in the Arctic. “The epochs with a low amount of winter precipitation in the north correspond to the epoch of warming of the Arctic, favorable conditions for swimming here, and at the same time, the low water of the Volga, and, as a result, the low level of the Caspian,” he wrote. - Studying the ancient Russian voyages in the Arctic Sea, I became convinced that in the era when the conditions for navigation in the Arctic were favorable, the level of the Caspian was low, and vice versa, when the Arctic Sea was cluttered with ice, the level of the Caspian rose high.

Even from the school bench, we learn about the Khazars when we learn by heart Pushkin's "Song of the Prophetic Oleg":

How the prophetic Oleg is now going
Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars...

The history of the Khazar state is closely connected with the history of Kievan Rus. The Khazars, the heirs of the great Turkic Khaganate, dominated at the end of the 1st millennium AD. e. almost over the entire territory of southeastern Europe. The Volga route "from the Varangians to the Khazars" competed with the Dnieper route "from the Varangians to the Greeks"; was on the Volga Big city Itil (named after the ancient name of the great river) is the capital of the Khazar state.

As studies of historians have shown, the Khazars cannot be considered "unreasonable" in any way. The well-known Russian orientalist V. V. Grigoriev wrote that the Khazar people in the Middle Ages were an unusual phenomenon: “Surrounded by wild and nomadic tribes, they had all the advantages of educated countries: organized government, extensive, flourishing trade and a standing army. When the greatest anarchy, fanaticism and deep ignorance challenged each other for dominion over Western Europe, the Khazar state was famous for its justice and religious tolerance, and those persecuted for the faith flocked to it from everywhere. Like a bright meteor, it shone brightly on the gloomy horizon of Europe and went out without leaving any traces.

Byzantine, Arab, Armenian, Georgian chroniclers wrote about the Khazars, and the Russian author of The Tale of Bygone Years also mentioned them. Having collected and carefully analyzed the information of medieval chroniclers, Professor Mikhail Illarionovich Artamonov published in 1962 the monograph “History of the Khazars”, dedicated to this disappeared people. The heyday of the Khazars began in the middle of the 7th century, when the descendants of the great ruler of the Turkic state, stretching from the Black to the Yellow Sea, created the Khazar Khaganate. At the beginning of the 8th century, the Khazars dominated numerous tribes living in the Volga basin: Pechenegs, Ugrians, Guzes, Burtases, Volga Bulgarians, etc. In that era, the Khazar Khaganate became a powerful barrier against the threat that was approaching Eastern Europe - the movement of hordes of Arabs -Muslims who captured Iran, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, vast territories of the Byzantine Empire, Central Asia, North India. In the struggle against the Arab caliphs, the Khazars, in alliance with other tribes, won. And from Europe to Asia and back along safe roads, caravans of merchants stretched.

The city of Itil, the capital of Khazaria, grew rich year by year. However, wealth accumulated mainly not in the hands of the Khazar rulers, but from foreign merchants. A stubborn struggle began between Khazaria with its "path from the Varangians to the Khazars" and Kievan Rus' with its "path from the Varangians to the Greeks", culminating in the victorious campaign of Prince Svyatoslav, son of Igor. In 965, he defeated the mercenary army of the Khazars and captured all the major cities of Khazaria. The dominance of the great Khazar Khaganate over all of southeastern Europe was ended.

Despite the "swords and fires" that "doomed the villages and fields" of the Khazars, the Khazar people, of course, did not disappear. The Khazars who survived the defeat turned to the Muslims for help, and Khazaria, the former, not so long ago, the main barrier against the onslaught of the Arabs, itself became a country of Islam. Year after year, the Khazars lose their territories, dissolve among the surrounding peoples. The last mention of the Khazars is in the list of tribes that submitted to Batu. Since then, the Khazars have disappeared forever from the historical arena.

Is it possible to find the ruins of the Khazar cities and settlements, find their capital on the Volga - the city of Itil, find graves, tools, weapons, dwellings of the disappeared people? The geographical coordinates of Khazaria are well known: this is the space between the Volga, Don and Terek. The Khazars lived here for a good thousand years ... but archaeologists could not find a single shard, not a single grave, not a single dwelling of the Khazars in the land of Khazaria!

Why? Historians of the Middle Ages report a lot of information about the Khazars, but archaeologists are unable to either prove or disprove this information, because there are no traces of the material culture of the Khazars. Maybe there are no traces of these, simply because in fact the Khazars did not live where archaeologists are looking for them, and they were not a powerful cultural people, but “a semi-wild, predatory steppe tribe”?

The well-known Soviet researcher of nomadic peoples, Doctor of Historical Sciences L. N. Gumilyov, disagreed with this opinion, offering his original solution to the “Khazar riddle”. The key to this riddle, in his opinion, should be the Earth sciences - geology and climatology.

Climate change in Europe and in the steppes of Central Asia depends on the direction of cyclones that bring warm, moisture-saturated air from the Atlantic. When the activity of the Sun is low, these cyclones sweep over the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan and "get stuck" in the Tien Shan and Altai mountains. Heavy rains fall on the steppes, deserts and semi-deserts, and they begin to be covered with green grass. Lake Balkhash and the Aral Sea fill with water and increase in size. The Caspian Sea, on the contrary, becomes shallow and dries up - after all, 80 percent of it is fed by the waters of the Volga, and cyclones, abundant in moisture, sweep south of the course of the great river.

But now the activity of the Sun is increasing, the avalanche of cyclones is shifting to the north, now sweeping over central Russia and getting lost in the expanses of Siberia. The Volga overflows, swamps the coastal forests and carries its plentiful and muddy waters to the Caspian. The sea increases in size, flooding the surrounding lands, while Balkhash and the Aral become shallow, not receiving moisture "intercepted" by the Volga.

When solar activity reaches its maximum, cyclones move further north: now they pass through Scandinavia to the White and Kara Seas, melting their ice. Starts to melt eternal Frost, water from tundra lakes is absorbed into the thawed soil, the lakes become shallow, the fish die in them, and famine comes to the tundra. Famine also comes to the southern steppes, which, not receiving the same amount of moisture, turn into semi-deserts and deserts. The Volga becomes shallower, left without moisture, and after that the Caspian decreases in size.

These are the three climatic cycles, the three great "seasons", each of which lasts from two to five centuries. The history of the nomadic peoples who inhabited the great steppe from the Black Sea to the Yellow Sea is inextricably linked with the change of these seasons: after all, the number of horses and sheep depended on the amount of grass in pastures, and the amount of grass, in turn, depended on the amount of moisture brought by cyclones from the Atlantic. .

In the 4th century, the dry "season" came to an end, and the steppes began to humidify. Nomadic tribes are entering a period of another flourishing. The Turkic tribes seize power over the great steppe, forming the Turkic Khaganate. The Volga, not receiving moisture from cyclones from the Atlantic (they pass south), becomes shallow, the Caspian recedes, and the culture of the Khazars begins to flourish in the lower reaches of the great river and in its delta. Here in the 7th century, the descendants of the last great kagan, the ruler of the Turks, transferred their residence.

But now a new climate cycle begins. Droughts are raging in the great steppe; The Volga, having received the “intercepted” moisture of the cyclones, swells and becomes watered; The Caspian overflows its banks and floods the lands of Khazaria. Nomadic tribes, driven by hunger and thirst, are attacking Khazaria from the east, from the west it is threatened by Kievan Rus, which has begun to unite, and from the south, the waters of the Caspian are inevitably advancing, flooding the flat shores of the “Caspian Netherlands”.

By the middle of the 10th century, two-thirds of the Khazar land is covered with water. In 965, the squad of Prince Svyatoslav overthrew the Khazar Khaganate with one mighty blow. And then the sea and drought complete the death of the Khazars - by the end of the 13th century, all their lands are under the waters of the Volga and the Caspian ... and the country of Khazaria becomes the Khazaria, the “Volga” and “Caspian” Atlantis ...

For several years, L. N. Gumilev led the search for the Khazarids. In the Volga delta, on the slope of a huge mound, he managed to find the first Khazar grave (during the period of the greatest rise in the level of the Volga - in the XIV century - the waves only washed the mound, which at that time was a real island). With the help of an excavator, shards of Khazar vessels were raised from the bottom of the Volga, in the central part of its delta. They were at a depth of 30 meters.

Does this mean that Khazaria has been found? A number of Soviet scientists believe that the fragments of ceramics found at the bottom of the Volga have nothing to do with the Khazars or the flooded country of the Khazars. Disputes are also ongoing around the capital of the Khazar Khaganate - the city of Itil. Some researchers believe that this city must be sought under water; others believe that the ruins of Itil will sooner or later be discovered on land; still others claim that they managed to find them in the land of the Volga region; finally, the fourth defend the point of view according to which there was no rich city of Itil with fortified walls, large buildings, etc. at all - there was only a huge camp of Khazar nomads, turned into a prosperous city by the fantasy of medieval chroniclers.

The Khazar riddle will receive a final solution only after detailed underwater archaeological studies of the bottom of the Caspian Sea and the Volga in its lower reaches and delta.

This short word contains the history of the origin of the seas and mountains, the secrets of lost civilizations and the charm of ancient mythology.

TETIS- an ancient ocean that stretched across the entire globe, starting on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean and ending on the western. TETHYS separated the ancient foremothers Laurasia and Gondwana, which gave rise to modern continents. The name TETIS was proposed at the end of the 19th century by the Austrian geologist E. Suess after the ancient Greek goddess of the sea, Thetis (Thetis).

According to the assumptions of scientists, the very first continent of the Earth - the ancestor of Pangea split into two supercontinents: the northern one - Laurasia and the southern one - Gondwana about 200 million years ago. Between the separated supercontinents, the TETIS ocean was formed.
Gondwana is the supercontinent of the southern hemisphere, which consisted of the main parts of the modern South America, Africa, Arabia, Antarctica, Australia, the Hindustan Peninsula and about. Madagascar. Laurasia - supercontinent northern hemisphere, which consisted of present-day North America and Eastern Europe.

The young Earth was in a powerful movement - separate continents broke away from the giant foremother, mountains were buried in the depths of the sea and, conversely, continents grew from the bottom of the ocean. In the depths of TETIS, a giant volcanic belt of the planet passed, volcanoes erupted here, the earth's crust shifted, torn and swelled. It is here, on the site of the ancient seas, that the highest mountain ranges will subsequently rise, and entire continents will drown in the abyss. Slowly but inexorably, Europe, North America, India, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica dispersed. At the same time, the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans began to form. The area of ​​the TETIS ocean began to decrease, while giant mountain ranges encircling the planet - the Atlas, the Alps, the Caucasus, the Pamirs, the Himalayas - grew out of its depths. The ocean turned into a sea, in the end, only the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian Seas, the Persian Gulf and the seas of the Malay Archipelago remained from it.

Maybe some of you want to know what will happen next?

According to the forecasts of scientists, the shift of the plates of Europe and Africa, which left only the Mediterranean basin from TETIS, will continue in the future and in 50 million years the remnants of TETIS in the form of the Mediterranean Sea will disappear completely, and Europe will be closely connected with North Africa.

This mysterious ocean left a memory of itself in the form of mighty mountain ranges stretching almost across the entire planet, which arose from its depths along the volcanic belt of the planet. It reminds of itself with global catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanic explosions, incredible paleontological discoveries, it is with the TETIS ocean that the greatest maritime secrets, myths about sunken civilizations, including the global flood and the mystery of the disappeared Atlantis.

It is no coincidence that the ancient ocean was named after the ancient Greek goddess. For the first time the name of the goddess TETIS is mentioned in the myths about the creation of the world and the gods. TETHYS sister, and later the wife of the Ocean, who gave rise to the seas and rivers. In addition, in later myths, TETIS (Thetis) is a kind goddess of the sea. TETIS, the first of the immortals who married a man, belongs to the category of good gods - patrons who help, protect and save those who get into trouble at sea. Thetis immediately and disinterestedly came to the aid of people and gods, it was not for nothing that seafarers of all times decorated the bow of ships with her image. TETIS, the eldest of the fifty Nereids - the daughters of the sea elder Nereus, who had the gift of divination and reincarnation, is one of the most attractive tragic and humane heroines of the myths of antiquity. Beautiful, kind and sympathetic, she was too good and smart to be happy.

All the difficulties of her fate began when two of the greatest gods at once - Poseidon and Zeus himself simultaneously turned their attention to her. Maybe she would have become the wife of the Thunderer and the ruler of Olympus, if not for the prophecy of the titan Prometheus, who predicted to Zeus that she would give birth to a son who would surpass his father. After that, Zeus forcibly married her to a mortal - the Thessalian king Peleus.

The wedding took place in the cave of the Ketaur Chiron, all the gods of Olympus walked on it, the only one who was not invited was the goddess of discord Eris, who managed to take revenge by throwing a golden apple from the garden of the Hesperides with the inscription “Most beautiful”. It was because of this “apple of discord” that Athena, Aphrodite and Hera quarreled and, ultimately, the Trojan War began.
From Peleus, TETIS gave birth to Achilles, whose prediction promised either great fame and early death, or a long, but unremarkable life. Of course, the life of Achilles was dearer than fame to a loving mother, wanting to save her son from death, she protected him by all possible means.

To make him immortal, she dipped the baby into the waters of the magical Styx, but only one place remained unwashed with water - the heel by which she held him (the same Achilles heel). TETIS asked Hephaestus to forge wonderful armor in which his son was invulnerable. In this armor, Achilles was impossible to defeat. Only the revenge of the god Apollo himself, who directed the arrow precisely at the vulnerable heel, interrupted the life of the greatest hero of the Trojan War.

According to legend, Thetis took the soul of Achilles to the island of Levka, where one can sometimes hear the powerful voice of the hero.

The Mediterranean basin, to which our seas also belong, has become the cradle of European civilization. The history of the Mediterranean Sea, according to many scientists, can also become the "key" to the history of our planet, to the history of the origin of the continents and oceans. A lot of hypotheses trying to explain the geological evolution of the Earth have been put forward over the past centuries. In principle, they can be divided into two groups. The first combines hypotheses that explain the history of the Earth by vertical movements of the crust - the uplifting of mountains, the failures of oceanic depressions, the formation of continents in place of deep seas, or, conversely, the "oceanization" of the continental crust. The second group, in addition to these vertical movements of the crust, also suggests horizontal ones, caused by the drift of the continents, the expansion of the Earth, etc. - the theory of mobilism.

The Tethys Ocean has a large place in the formations of mobilists. At the end of the Paleozoic, about 200 million years ago, as the creator of this hypothesis, the German scientist Alfred Wegener, assumed, a single landmass, Pangea, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, split into two supercontinents: the northern one - Laurasia and the southern one - Gondwana. The “gap” between these supercontinents, steadily expanding, gave rise to the Tethys Sea, a kind of bay of the single Panthalassa pra-ocean that embraced the entire planet. Then the split of Laurasia and Gondwana into separate continents began, the movement of continental plates became more complicated. As Europe, North America, India, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica "dispersed", the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans were formed - and at the same time, the area of ​​the Tethys Sea was shrinking. The majestic Alps, the Caucasus, the Pamirs, the Himalayan mountains, which were once the bottom of the Tethys, rose. And from the Tethys Sea itself, only the Mediterranean and the Black Sea associated with it remained.

And what then? And here it is necessary to introduce another concept - Pontida. According to the leading authorities in geology of the late 19th - early 20th century E. Suess, F. Oswald, the best expert on the Black Sea N. I. Andrusov, the president of the Geographical Society Academician L. S. Berg, the greatest Soviet zoogeographer Professor I. I. Puzanov, it existed on the site of the Black Sea basin until the end of the Pliocene, that is, about one or two million years ago. The mountainous Crimea at that time was the northernmost outskirts of Pontida and was connected by mainland land not only with Asia Minor, but also with the Balkan Peninsula and the Caucasus. In favor of this hypothesis, its supporters cited interesting facts related not only to the geology of the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, but also to the specific fauna and flora of the Crimean Peninsula.

And if we talk about Pontida not geological or zoogeographical, but historical, then we should first of all talk about the vast expanses of the Black Sea shelf. They were dry land in the era of the existence of Homo sapiens. And Paleolithic people lived on this land, starting with the Neanderthals (traces of which were found in the mountainous Crimea along with the remains of a wild horse and a mammoth). Primitive people, who did not know navigation, undoubtedly got to the Crimea via land bridges from the regions of Transcaucasia, the Balkans or the southwestern marginal East European Plain.

The shallow shelf zone occupies almost the entire northwestern part of the Black Sea and significant areas of the southwestern part (its area is almost a fourth of the Black Sea area). It ends at a depth of 90-110 meters with a continental slope, steeply leaving to the two-kilometer depths of the sea. In the era of the last glaciation, it was a plain along which rivers flowed, the channels of which became underwater valleys, continuing the valleys of modern land rivers. In the north-west of the Black Sea, where the mighty rivers Danube, Dniester, Southern Bug, Dnieper flow into, the width of the shelf reaches 200 and even 250 kilometers (off the coast of Asia Minor and the Caucasus, it is only a few kilometers, or even hundreds of meters). Once these rivers formed a single system - the Paleo-Danube, primitive people lived on the banks of the Paleo-Danubian rivers. Their sites are found on land, but they can also be on the shelf of the Black Sea.

“So what is the promised secret here?” the patient reader will ask. And it is simple and obvious. We live at the bottom of the Tethys Ocean. And this is especially striking when you look at the limestone cliffs of the Crimean cuestas, at the mountains in the Novy Svet and Sudak - the former reefs of this ocean.

And when you look at the Karadag peaks and rocks, for some reason you think of a hypothetical Pontida. And also about the fact that we are pollen in the great picture of nature. What are the kings...

Sergei Tkachenko,