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Old 17th November 2012, 12:25 PM   #18
Dinwar
Penultimate Amazing
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 16,668
Well, to be fair there is one way in which a catastrophe could wipe out a civilization and all records: if it was an island nation, and the island exploded. Krakatoa-like event or something similar. That said, such a civilization would necessarily be fairly small; they'd only have the resources of that island, after all (otherwise we'd see evidence of them). And extremely small groups tend to not develop high technology by themselves.

Originally Posted by HansMustermann
Something from BEFORE the ice age would still have the same water line as today. It'll only be under water if it was underwater in the first place.
Sea level bounced around a bit, following the glacial/interglacial sequence. During glaciation there's lower seas, during interglacials the seas are higher. Anything built during MIS 12 would have been inundated during MIS 11 (MIS=marine isotope stage; evens are glacial periods, odds are interglacials, and the numbers count backwards from today). That said, you're right, we're talking about a fairly narrow--and intensely examined--band of sea here. Continental shelves tend to be extremely profitable, so a lot of people have done a lot of mapping. We've found a few buried cities, but nothing like an unexpectedly advanced civilization that was previously unknown (we've found evidence that known civilizations were a tad more advanced than we credit them for, but that's about it).
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