Flooding on the Bristol Channel 1607

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The floods on the Bristol Channel in 1607 were the most momentous natural disaster to hit Great Britain in historical times.

Course and possible causes

Contemporary representation
Flood mark in Goldcliff Parish Church in Goldcliff, Newport, Wales

At noon on January 20th jul. / January 30th 1607 greg. the coasts on both sides of the Bristol Channel were hit by an unusually high wave. According to the most abundant contemporary source, a twelve-page print from 1607 ( A true report of certaine wonderfull ouerflowings of Waters, now lately in Summerset-shire, Norfolke and other places of England ... ), the flood came unexpectedly under a blue sky and broke through the coastal dikes in many places and flooded numerous low-lying villages in Devon , Somerset , Gloucestershire and on the opposite bank in Wales . Around 2,000 people are said to have drowned, the city of Cardiff was particularly badly hit. At many churches in the region there are still level markings that indicate the peak of the tidal wave.

The causes of the flood are not clear; for centuries the event was usually viewed as a storm surge . The thesis, first formulated in 1913, that a seaquake triggered the tidal wave, received new impetus through a publication in 2002 and subsequently some attention in the English daily press due to the devastating seaquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004 . For example, a tsunami expert from Cardiff University in the Times in 2005 called for preventive measures to be taken in the event of another seaquake in the region, as Cardiff is one of the “cities most at risk from tsunamis in the world”.

literature

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