In the 1980s a group of us were walking up a path on the coast near the village of Wenhaston in Suffolk. One of our number, a local man, remarked that he hadn't been there for a few years, when a man with a shotgun appeared and ordered us off his land.
Our friend protested that we were on a public footpath.
The man with the gun shouted that that particular path had disappeared into the sea and that we were trespassing!

I find it amusing that people see the loss of cities AS a loss.

Nothing holds humanity back like cities.

All great spiritual and intellectual growth has come from the death of cities and civilizations.

Rome had knowledge, but didn't apply it. It was only after the death of Rome that we could have the Renaissance. Rome had art, but little humanity. Without Rome, you get da Vinci and Michelangelo. As we now know, there were no Dark Ages, only recovery and appreciation of what had existed, but had been ignored. Then came the application of that knowledge, and a far, far better and more civilized world resulted.

So let the cities fall into the ocean. Only a fool would miss them.

What should you do if you think you discovered an ancient city lost at sea?

I wonder if people then were panicking over such unssen things as "global warming". By attributing everything today to global warming, we're no better than our ancestors who attributed everything to "God".

The photograph in the article seems to indicate this was a view from 1750! How is that possible? When was the photo taken?

Article immensely intriguing: our family lost a large home on a peninsula Bayocean northwest Oregon just after "Pearl Harbor". US Army Corps Engineers had built a jetty to divert ocean current from silting navigable Tillamook Bay. Consequently, violent winter current thrust against our peninsula's shoreline, year after year, until we were swept out to sea. My Daddy said we'll probably end up in Japan; but, at least foundation-remains of that precious abode can be found under and some feet out from original peninsula's perimeters.

More importantly, story/history of Phoenician lst explorers international merchants fascinates. They were out there navigating around Africa, 400BC, marketing goods of the Egyptian Pharoah Hanno. There is evidence that they hit the eastern shores of South America (Brazil,) and even of North America - where the winds carried them 2000 YEARS BEFORE COLUMBUS !

Because they lost Carthage, their western capitol, they lost to Rome which wrote the history. So, their finesse with first far-flung exploration, the invention of glass, our alphabet(they needed a means to record billings,) and even the Phoenician Hiram was chosen to engineer and build Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.

We must rewrite this history by exploring Mediterranean and eastern South American underwater shorelines - with schooners, professional divers (Robert Ballard? who has already found the oldest ship (Phoenician,) naval archeologists, photographers, sailors, volunteers. Fact that Phoenicians are ancestors of Lebanese adds good value to our having American University in Beirut (and Cairo, also Colleges Istanbul, Aleppo). We could do so much to spirit life, intellect abroad - educate here !

Marine Archeology has been keenly featured in your articles and now I just itch to take the subject literally and physically so much deeper and further back into ancient history. Phoenicia is the STARTING POINT !

Appreciatively - elisabeth coats sherif

I understand the fascination with cities like Dunwich because I am very intrigued by this subject. At the same time, I do not believe archeologists and oceanographers go far enough in their research on such sites as Dunwich. Why not take a look at the possibilities of cities existing along ancient coast lines PRIOR to the thawing of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age? By most accounts, ocean levels were anywhere from 400 to 500 feet lower than they are today. This means if a city existed along the coastline of that time period, it would now be 400 to 500 feet under water and almost impossible to excavate. Could this explain the lingering myth of Atlantis? Given the rate at which the thaw took place, water would have inundated any human settlement of that time period in very short order. It may have taken a few years for the cities to be swamped, but the rise in sea level would have been unstoppable and the submergence of the cities inevitable. Not enough attention is being paid to this very important and very un-researched subject, which has the potential of changing our most fundamental views of ancient history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich

The Domesday Book of 1086 describes it as possessing three churches. The historian and diver Stuart Bacon, who has made several visits to the seabed in a bid to find the remains of the old town, has found evidence that it may have possessed up to 18 churches and chapels at the height of its fortune during the 12th and 13th centuries.

In 1286 a large storm swept much of the town into the sea and the River Dunwich was partly silted up. Residents fought to save the harbour but this too was destroyed by an equally fierce storm in 1328, which also swept away the entire village of Newton, a few miles up the coast. Another large storm in 1347 swept some 400 houses into the sea. A quarter of the city had been lost and the remainder of Dunwich was lost to the sea over a period of two to three hundred years through a form of coastal erosion known as long-shore drift. Buildings that sit on the present day cliffs were once a MILE INLAND.
**********
That should answer the why-didn't-they-move-it question.

It wasn't that hard to find the answers. The loss of this town happened over a period of a few hundred years in incremental stages. And in the Middle Ages, I would think that they had enough on their plates just getting through day to day life without contemplating moving the buildings inland. Note this segment from the wikipedia entry which says that the clifftop ruins that are still visible in the present day were once a MILE inland. That's rather a LOT of coastal movement.
**********
In 1286 a large storm swept much of the town into the sea and the River Dunwich was partly silted up. Residents fought to save the harbour but this too was destroyed by an equally fierce storm in 1328, which also swept away the entire village of Newton, a few miles up the coast. Another large storm in 1347 swept some 400 houses into the sea. A quarter of the city had been lost and the remainder of Dunwich was lost to the sea over a period of two to three hundred years through a form of coastal erosion known as long-shore drift. Buildings that sit on the present day cliffs were once a mile inland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich

The coastline was eroded. The stone buildings wouldn't have washed away; they're too heavy. As the sand and dirt washed away, the buildings sank slowly under the water. This happened centuries ago, so the people probably just moved inland and finally just moved far enough away to start a new city -- or just become part of another community.

It's different now. Think of Venice. Now there are all kinds of efforts to preserve it. If it had sunk as much as it has a thousand years ago, it would have been abandoned, decay would have taken over, and now it would just be a curiosity.

To answer your question Jim, They may not have had the right technology, or money to move an entire town for the sake of some museum artifacts. Besides, we're learning, just as much about it now as we would if they tried to move it.

I agree - this was a tantalizing article. As I read the article I was having a hard time featuring how this could have happened. Even the photo gave no clues. I would be interested to learn more about this - and the other cities.

You might want to consider Dwarka to be added to this list. Here's a link from the Archaeological Survey of India with some details of the explorations done:
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/may102004/1256.pdf

I am another inquiring mind that wants to know also. It would be good to know really what happened there and how to prevent it from occurring again.
SH

In response to wb confusion.

The Churches are indeed in ruins on the sea floor having collapsed down the cliff like the one shown in the photo. However, the earlier parts of the town close to the harbour did not go over a cliff as the sea eroded the coastline but were probably overwhelmed in storm surges. Hence their foundations may remain in-situ though with their walls in ruins around them. Hope this helps clarify the situation.

If Dunwich was inundated by erosion, a slow process, how come the structures weren't removed to higher ground? I'm thinking of Nauset light on Cape Cod. If you have the technology to built a structure, it would seem you could move it as well.

This article is so confusing. Why is the city 30 feet under the water. The article says erosion took the city away but then it says churches have been found 30 feet under the water. If they were eroded away why would they still be intact??? Wouldn't there just be pieces scattered here and there instead of intact structures. Or has the ocean risen over 30 feet since before 1750. Are Alexandria and the other cities mentioned also about 30 feet deep. It sounds like it since you can see one city from a glass bottomed boat and can put an undersea museum on another. Did separate earthquakes sink all of these cities and sink them all to a similar depth?? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.

Amazing, one day my children's children will take scenic tours over New York. "Is it not a wonderful ever changing world in which wen live in",(Paul McCartney.