BBC - Search Results For severn river

my ancestors lived, and I went to boarding schools, on both sides of the Severn estuary and we were taken to see the severn bore as children Google Image Search: "severn bore"

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Tsunami theory of flood disaster

Professors Ted Bryant and Simon Haslett believe a tidal wave hit south Wales A tsunami in the Bristol Channel could have caused the deaths of up to 2,000 people in one of Britain's greatest natural disasters, experts have said. For centuries, it has been thought that the great flood of January 1607 was caused by high tides and severe storms. It is estimated that 200 square miles of land in south Wales and south west England were covered by water. In Timewatch at 2100 GMT on BBC2 on Friday, two experts argue a tsunami could have caused the devastation. Eyewitness accounts of the disaster, published in six different pamphlets of the time, told of "huge and mighty hills of water" advancing at a speed "faster than a greyhound can run" and only receding 10 days later. The extensive area in blue shading was affected by the 1607 disaster Professor Simon Haslett, from Bath Spa University College, said: "There is an overall theme running through the pamphlets of a destructive event, very violent, disastrous, on a scale that is unprecedented." Australian geologist Ted Bryant, from the University of Wollongong, agreed: "The waves are described as mountainous - that's a description of a tsunami." During the programme, Mr Haslett and Mr Bryant revealed evidence from all around the Severn Estuary backing up their theory. This included a layer of sand in mud deposits at Cardiff's Rumney Wharf, in which pebbles and pieces of broken-up shell can be found. They claimed that these deposits were brought in from the open ocean around 400 years ago, possibly by a tsunami. And they argued that boulders lying on the shore in Dunraven Bay in south Wales could have been carried into their positions by the force of the onrushing waters. The disaster of 1607 was recorded in several pamphlets at the time "Whether it is sand on the marsh, or it's pebbles in the clay, or it's erosion on the headland or boulders piled up in key spots, you go for the simplest explanation, and I can put down most of the signatures we have seen by one wave," said Mr Bryant. However, Dr Devin Horsburgh, from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, said some of the phenomena found could have been caused by a massive storm surge, formed by a combination of high tides and hurricane winds. "A storm surge is going to provide some billions tonnes of water rushing across the flood plain and is more than capable of picking up enormous rocks and large amounts of sediment and depositing them a long way away," he said. Further evidence supporting the tsunami theory came from Dr Roger Musson, head of seismic hazards at the British Geological Survey, who said there were other examples of earthquakes in the area caused by an ancient fault off south-west Ireland. Timewatch uses computer graphics to recreate what the wave could have looked like One quake, measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, was recorded there on 8 February 1980. "The idea of putting a large historical earthquake in this spot is not so fanciful," he said. "We know from seismological evidence, that we have actually had an earthquake here - so there is a fault and it is moving, it is active." Other UK tsunamis include a 70ft high wave that hit Scotland 7,000 years ago, following a massive landslip in Norway. Three months ago, a tsunami triggered by a submarine earthquake near northern Indonesia killed nearly 300,000 people.

== I looked around the BBC website for a video repeat of this programme to link to
but could not find one - only news and radio:-(