Zanclean Megaflood

Rob Bell:
Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations The Podcast, a fortnightly feast of curiosity quenching discussion prompted by the vast collection of sketches at sketchplanations.com.

I'm engineer and broadcaster Rob Bell, and with me is designer and creator of Sketchplanations, Jono Hey, and alas, for the very first time on the podcast, we're without the unique mind of entrepreneur Tom Pellereau.

The last time he mysteriously disappeared like this, he was allegedly on a long business trip to China, which turned out to be a lie.

He was, in fact, secretly winning The Apprentice.

Anyway, we'll crack on and hope he makes it back for the next episode.

Let's get straight in to this episode topic then, which is the Zanclean Megaflood, a ludicrously large and violent flood of water that resulted in the Mediterranean Sea we know today.

We'll talk about the geological events that led up to this spectacle, ponder what it might have been like to see it, and generally try to convey the epic nature of the natural world.

You should be able to see Jono's sketch for this up on your screens now, and if you want to take a closer look, as well as see other similar sketches, you can head to sketchplanations.com.

And if you have any thoughts or facts you'd like to share with us about similarly wild natural events, or anything pod related you want to get off your chest, you can send your emails to hello at sketchplanations.com, or you can leave us a voicenote through the podcast website.

Right then, to business, the Zanclean Megaflood.

Now, we could tell this story on our own, but to properly do it justice, we're very happy to say that joining us on the podcast this time, we have the man who took this story to global stardom on Twitter a couple of years ago, reaching over 10 million people with his thread of highly engaging posts on the matter.

Mike Soden is a travel writer and writing coach, and reigns in his own kingdom of curiosity via his hugely popular science newsletter, or in his own words, Nerd's Letter, on Substack, called Everything Is Amazing.

Mike is a huge advocate of being curious, and encourages all his fans and subscribers to discover and notice their own worlds around them.

And as such, he couldn't be more welcome on this podcast.

Hello, Mike.

Mike Sowden:
Hello, Rob.

Very nice to meet you.

Hello, Jono as well.

Rob Bell:
Thank you very much for coming on.

Mike Sowden:
Absolute pleasure.

I love what you're doing here, and I'm just going to have to be very careful.

I don't steal all your ideas from this point onwards, now that I discovered you.

Jono Hey:
Excellent.

We'll have a story and a sketch for all of them.

That would be brilliant.

Rob Bell:
Can I accurately describe what you do there?

There is your newsletter.

You are a travel writer.

What else would we say about Mike Soden?

Mike Sowden:
My path has been a very random path through life, and it's only until recently that it all started to make sense inside my own head.

I used to be an archaeologist.

I worked in a pottery for five years.

I worked in insurance, all sorts of crazy stuff that I couldn't really connect the dots with.

I used to be a travel writer, I should say.

I was a travel writer until the pandemic because, of course, travel writing went away in the pandemic, and I suddenly had to discover a new career for myself.

I had an idea of the kind of writing I've been wanting to do for about 10 years, that I could never find an audience for when I was pitching it to magazines.

It was kind of sciencey and very written in a kind of approachable and slightly self-mocking kind of way that I knew from travel writing and from reading travel writing like Bill Bryson.

He's an expert at very, very approachable, very casual in a very meticulous and actually quite brilliantly sculpted way.

And he would write something and then cap it off with a joke or a bout of self-assassination.

And that makes you want to really lean into the writing.

Rob Bell:
It's a nice style, isn't it?

Yeah.

Mike Sowden:
It's fun.

I love that kind of style of writing and I could never, I could never pitch, you know, BBC travel with something like that because that's not house style.

So I really wanted to have a go at writing a newsletter, make it a paid newsletter.

So I could maybe just for the first time experiment and see if I can make a living from this kind of writing.

And it absolutely took off in a way that makes the rest of my writing career look like I had no idea what I was doing, which I didn't, to be fair.

Rob Bell:
Does your background in archaeology affect the way you write or has it affected your curiosity to seek out stories and just ask questions and understand how things work and why things are the way they are?

Mike Sowden:
Absolutely.

Lots of people go into archaeology from all sorts of directions.

And then after they leave archaeology, they head out in all sorts of directions, like I think it's the managing director of British Airways, had a degree or an MA in archaeology.

The people that you can see are going to stay in archaeology for the next 50 years.

You know, they usually have the Indiana Jones hat and maybe they speak in a, in a some, you know, like a West country accent or something like that.

But a lot of people that I, a lot of students that I work with at university, they've just gone off and done such different things.

But all of them, we all ended up with this enormous grab bag of skills.

So you learned how to present, you learn how to think analytically, all sorts of things, interrogating sources of information, critical thinking.

So you have people who are interested in the science, and then the arts.

And the art side is stories.

And so you're taught to present something as a story and understand something as a story, and then how to scientifically interrogate that story.

And archaeologists have to deal with members of the public.

They've got to present this stuff in a way that's fun and engaging and interesting.

So we have to learn.

We're trying not to dumb it down, but we do have to sensationalize a little bit.

Rob Bell:
And I'm all for that, Mike.

I have to say, I am all for that.

I'm not scared of a bit of sensationalism because the Zanclean Megaflood was phenomenal.

Mike Sowden:
The Zanclean Megaflood, I mean, it sounds like a rock band.

Rob Bell:
Shall we get into it?

Let's get into it.

Jono Hey:
So I have this sketch which I did a long time ago, which I called The Making of the Med.

And I was reflecting when I saw your brilliant story about it.

And I was like, I know that, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out where I knew it from.

Oh really?

Rob Bell:
Yeah, okay.

Jono Hey:
And I remember wanting to do a sketch about it just because it was one of these things where I'd heard about it.

And you're like, what?

You're serious?

Like, it's the sort of thing you can look at a globe and this thing happened and you're like, no, that can't really be true.

But I believed it enough that it should warrant a sketch.

So I did this little three-part sketch.

You can see that and go look it up.

But we should we should talk about Mike's version of events as the real thing.

Rob Bell:
So let's hand over to you.

You sit down and tell anyone the story.

I defy anyone to not go, what?

Wow.

Where do we begin with this?

Is there kind of context setting of where and well, we own a web, but kind of when and what the state of play was?

Is that?

Mike Sowden:
I guess the setting is over the last hundreds of millions of years, although the continents that we know have been moving around.

I mean, it's crazy how much that moved around.

There is the Isle of Arran, which is just across from me up here in Scotland, actually started its life near the South Pole.

It's just absurd.

You can go to a map and you can look at the Mediterranean Sea.

It's two and a half thousand miles across from Gibraltar to Turkey.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, East-West.

Mike Sowden:
It's around a million cubic miles of seawater, essentially.

You can look at that and you can think that must have been there forever.

That's as unchanging as the mountains that I can see at my window, that kind of thing.

But it really wasn't.

If you go back about five and a half million years ago, the Straits of Gibraltar were landlocked.

The Mediterranean Sea, which it seems like it was a sea at some point before that, but it had sealed up and then it started to evaporate.

Rob Bell:
It sealed up at Gibraltar, so between Gibraltar and Morocco?

Mike Sowden:
Yes, Gibraltar and across to Tangier, and that was a land bridge.

It was like the land bridge that connected Britain to Europe.

So there was actually a megaflood that happened when that land bridge broke.

So we have our own little megaflood.

At one point, there was an enormous lake that was off the coast of Anglia, an enormous kind of glacial lake, and then it broke through this, broke through what's now the English Channel and carved it out.

And so we have our own megafloods back in history, but this one was the big one.

This is just on a scale that the world has not seen ever.

Rob Bell:
So we're five and a half million years ago.

Yes.

Prior to five and a half million years ago, we figured that there was a Mediterranean, not dissimilar to how we know it today.

Is that right?

Mike Sowden:
Yeah, it's unclear how much so, but it seems like there have been cycles of it sealing up and then opening throughout history.

But around five and a half million years ago, there was this bridge and it allowed the whole of the Mediterranean Basin to really evaporate down to these series of enormous salty lakes.

Rob Bell:
Can I ask you that?

That bridge is formed, what, because of tectonic movement?

Is that right?

Mike Sowden:
It seems that way, yeah.

So it's the continents moving around over enormous periods of time, but also just tectonic movement, moving the rocks, you know, thrusting up, thrusting up the land.

Rob Bell:
So almost like huge lock gates then have kind of been closed at the mouth of the Mediterranean, where it leaks out into the Atlantic.

Mike Sowden:
Exactly that.

And there was no water coming in.

So the Atlantic was the was the source of the water, you know, incoming water of the Mediterranean, and it is now.

So that's most of the water coming in.

But without that, it just started to evaporate away.

And obviously, there's precipitation filling it a little bit, but the evaporation is much, much faster.

So it just evaporated all the way down.

And we're talking over a mile.

So you have these enormous salty lakes, and you have the Strait of Gibraltar just landlocked.

And the theory used to be that there was some kind of stream through this area, and then the stream gradually over a course of a few decades maybe widened slightly.

And then, and then eventually over a few hundred years, this turned into a river.

And then gradually, this very slow breach happened.

And then at the end of it, you ended up having the remainder of it breaking away and it came through.

So it was a very gradual process, maybe happening over centuries, maybe even thousands of years.

Because that was, that used to be the model for geology.

There was this kind of, in the early days of geology, it used to be thought that, they called it uniformitarianism, which is like gradual changes, how most stuff happens.

And then there was a shift to thinking about catastrophism, which is like, oh, these massive, great big crazy things happen.

And this is where you can bring in, you know, the wrath of God and so on.

And so this became popular for different reasons.

And then these two schools of thought, kind of warring with each other.

And really, they're both right.

Of course, they're both right, because gradual processes happen, and also massive events happen.

You have things eroding away, and you have Krakatoa exploding, you know.

But what happened with the Zanclean Megaflood was, it was assumed that it was a gradual process.

Rob Bell:
And the idea, I guess, with that land bridge that we talked about then between Spain and Morocco, closing off that mouth, the idea would be that as the Mediterranean then evaporated away and the levels of the sea was getting lower and lower and lower, the Atlantic was staying pretty much the same on the other side, right?

Mike Sowden:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
So a difference between those two levels of water was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Mike Sowden:
Yes.

So there's more and more pressure on the Atlantic side, and that would at some point lead to a structural breach.

But that breach was presumed to be gradual, a slowish thing.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Mike Sowden:
But what happened recently is scientists have started to look at the evidence on the sea floor of the Mediterranean.

Right.

And they discovered underneath the Strait of Gibraltar, there is a basically a trench carved out through all the sediment and all the rock.

And it's over 200 miles long, you know, and so something incredibly violent must have happened to carve this out and to do that, not in a gradual way, but in a way that has enough violence behind it, that it can cut through rock, which is insane.

So they started to look at this, they started to look at a buildup of sediment that is west of Sicily.

Now, to understand this, you need to know the Mediterranean sea floor is on two levels.

The eastern Mediterranean is deeper.

I think it's about 100 meters, something like that, 100 meters deeper, something like that.

But essentially, it's two basins and one is deeper than the other.

Rob Bell:
Okay.

Mike Sowden:
So if there was a flood, then all this water would roll through and then all the water would roar over this interface point between the two levels, and you'd have an enormous waterfall.

Rob Bell:
And that interface between the Western Med, which is shallower, and the Eastern Med, which is deeper, where is that intersection?

Mike Sowden:
Yeah, it's basically if you run a line down through the west of Sicily and down to Tunisia.

Rob Bell:
And it is quite sudden, is it, between one and the other?

Mike Sowden:
It is quite sudden, yeah.

And you know, the Mediterranean around Greece, that's as deep as the Mediterranean gets.

It's quite a bit deeper.

Rob Bell:
Okay.

Mike Sowden:
But to the east of Sicily is the point, there is this, even now, there is this ledge.

And what they found at this point was an enormous amount of sediment.

And this sediment is all the sediment that was carved out in Gibraltar.

So it's like, this is all the stuff that was, yeah.

And it's exactly, it's an enormous distance away.

How could it possibly be carried all that way?

And then dumped into the lower part of the Mediterranean, unless there was a water movement of an unimaginable violence.

So they discovered all this and they started looking to it.

They formulated a new timeline for the Zanclean Megaflood that is like 18 months.

The Mediterranean filled up in 18 months.

That's what they reckon.

18 months, maybe two years.

Jono Hey:
Wow.

Mike Sowden:
It was so violent that when the Eastern Mediterranean part was filling up at its fastest rise, it was rising by 10 meters a day, which is if you can...

Rob Bell:
Can you imagine that?

Mike Sowden:
You know, imagine your local sea rising.

Rob Bell:
Exactly right.

If you had a very deep but not very big swimming pool, you left the tap on, you'd struggle to have that fill 10 meters a day.

This is on the scale of a sea filling up by 10 meters a day across a huge area.

Wow.

Mike Sowden:
The calculation is 100 million cubic meters of water a second.

Rob Bell:
Do you know when numbers go suddenly over a certain limit?

That sounds like a lot.

Jono Hey:
A lot of numbers.

Mike Sowden:
That is the problem with writing about it.

You've got to translate it into...

Rob Bell:
To say again, 100 million...

Mike Sowden:
100 million cubic meters of water per second going through the former land bridge at the Straits of Gibraltar, which had now breached.

It wasn't a waterfall, it was a slope.

But this slope went on for hundreds of miles, and all this water was roaring down it.

Rob Bell:
Do you know partly why it's so hard to come up with an analogy for this?

Because there is nothing else, right?

Exactly.

Mike Sowden:
There's nothing else.

Rob Bell:
As massive and as epic as this.

Mike Sowden:
Yep.

It's the kind of thing, if it was in a film, you go, yeah, come on.

It's like it's that point.

It's like it's a sci-fi film.

You've been enjoying it up to that point.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Mike Sowden:
It's felt a bit scary because it's kind of plausible.

And then you have this and you go, well, you can do anything with CGI now.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
It's like a Michael Mann film.

Yeah.

Mike Sowden:
Exactly.

Jono Hey:
You know what, that part of what made me want to sketch it, apart from the fact that the Mediterranean could have filled in different ways, right?

Like it could have always been part of the Atlantic and then closed off to be narrow.

And it was just always full.

It didn't have to do this.

So it's like remarkable that it filled up from this end as it kind of looks.

But the middle frame of the sketch is kind of, can you imagine what it would have been like to be standing in Gibraltar or Tangiers looking at this waterfall happening?

Rob Bell:
Didn't you draw two or three little figures watching on, Jono?

Jono Hey:
I did, yeah.

Because I've been impressed with big waterfalls before and it's wonderful.

But this is a scale of waterfall the size of an ocean.

Mike Sowden:
Yeah, this is the kind of thing, if I had a time machine, I would immediately go back and see that.

Rob Bell:
Five and a half million.

Mike Sowden:
But it's like, what would the conditions be?

What would the ground be like under your feet?

What would the sound be like?

Would you be able to see anything because of the amount of spray coming up?

It's like, I just want to know.

From a physics perspective, I really want to understand what it would be like.

I wish somebody would really do a plausible reconstruction of what it would be like, just to have it in VR, you know, just you're standing there and it would be amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Bell:
And the whole floor is shaking.

Mike Sowden:
Exactly, yeah.

Rob Bell:
So five and a half minutes, I mean, was there in?

Mike Sowden:
There were no humans.

As anatomical humans have been around 300,000 years is our limit as homo sapiens, sapiens.

So it used to be presumed that there were no hominid populations in Europe at that time because they were all in Africa.

And that's our ancestry coming from Africa, you know?

But I think there's been some recent stuff saying that, I don't know how far back this goes, but there's been some recent stuff saying that humans were in Europe much earlier than we ever presumed.

I say humans, sorry, hominids, I should say our ancestors, our distant ancestors, but they wouldn't have been around, you know, five and a half million years ago.

Rob Bell:
Fine.

Mike Sowden:
That's just too long.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

The Earth is undoubtedly a spectacular place and the BBC's Natural History Unit do a great job bringing, you know, nature's wildest visuals into our living rooms.

But, you know, had they been around at the time, perhaps even they wouldn't have been able to do this event justice.

Mike Sowden:
Absolutely.

Rob Bell:
As you say, with just that, like the amount of spray, yeah.

If you go to Niagara Falls on a particularly, when the conditions are in a particular, you can't really see that much.

Yeah.

This is that.

Mike Sowden:
Rainbows and everything.

I mean, can you imagine?

Can you imagine like there's like 10 different rainbows across the Gibraltar Strait and you're seeing, I don't know how it works, but that's probably, we can imagine.

Rob Bell:
No one was there to tell us that they didn't.

Mike Sowden:
See, this is where I understand somebody like Roland Emmerich, who gets a bit carried away.

Because if I was doing this and I had special effects skills, I would want to get carried away.

I mean, it's just an incredible thing and you'd want to throw everything in the pot.

Jono Hey:
For those of us not as familiar with Roland Emmerich, what should people know about him?

Mike Sowden:
Well, he's the guy who does all the big disaster movies, like, what is it, 2012 and the Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day.

He's the guy who does the absolutely enormous world scale special effects, you know, continents splitting in half, the moon crashing into the earth, all that kind of stuff.

He loves to kind of go as maximum as possible.

And this feels like something that he...

I'm surprised he hasn't done it, because this is the kind of skill that kind of he would love to have a go at.

Jono Hey:
Maybe you should write it.

Rob Bell:
Maybe he's been building up to it all his career.

Mike Sowden:
He'd probably fill it with aliens and stuff.

I'm not sure I want to do that.

But in fact, there was a series of science fiction books from, I think, the 1980s by an author called Julian May.

And in these books, the Zanclean Megaflood is a plot point.

And this is actually aliens of...

This is in the far...

In the distant past, like five million years ago, humans have gone back and they've discovered that the earth has been taken over by alien species.

And the Zanclean Megaflood in these books is a work of human terrorism.

Rob Bell:
Oh, wow.

Mike Sowden:
So that's how they get rid of them.

Rob Bell:
Oh, wow.

Mike Sowden:
Because they're all in the basin of the Mediterranean.

Yeah, people have been thinking big about this stuff for a long time.

Rob Bell:
That is a thought I've had.

So there would have been living species kicking about with that, yeah.

Mike Sowden:
Yes, there would have been creatures living at the bottom.

Rob Bell:
This is what I mean.

So as it's all evaporated, there are vast, great big salt plains, I guess, then, that are left behind.

And over time, there would be creatures there.

I mean, they wouldn't stand a chance, right, with that volume and that rate of water that was coming through.

Mike Sowden:
They wouldn't.

And we have, there's an interesting analogy with the UK.

Have you ever heard of Doggland?

Rob Bell:
Yeah, as in Dogger fish a German bite on the shipping forecast.

Mike Sowden:
That's right.

So Doggland, I see, 6,000 years ago, when the sea was much, much lower than it is now, Doggland was a landmass that connected the UK with Norway.

Rob Bell:
So it's kind of off Lincolnshire Coast, isn't it?

Mike Sowden:
Yes, that's right.

And it was out that way.

And that was the Lowlands and the UK, as we know it now, was basically the highlands, the mountains.

So we live in the mountains of Doggerland.

But in Doggerland, there were Mesolithic people, tribes of people moving around and they were living there.

Because of course, in the Lowlands at that time, was where all the good food was, where all the fishing was and everything.

Rob Bell:
Right, yeah.

Okay.

Mike Sowden:
And what there was at one point was a landslip off the coast of Norway.

And it was called the Storregge Slide.

Rob Bell:
Sounds fun.

Mike Sowden:
And this is another one that kind of blows your mind.

Now, the Storregge Slide moved 840 cubic miles of earth and rock into the sea.

And on the bottom of the sea, that ran for 1,000 miles, a landslide that ran for 1,000 miles under the sea.

Now, what that did was that created this enormous pulse of energy into the sea.

And what happens?

You get tsunamis.

So you had a series of tsunamis.

And one of these swept over Doggerland and hit, you know, the coast of the traces of it are now seen in Scotland.

But it must have been, for those Mesolithic people who are still living in Doggerland, it must have been like the end of the world.

So these were waves, you know, up to 25 meters high in places, sweeping in one long kind of tsunami all the way across.

And that was the end of pretty much everyone who was living in Doggerland at the time.

Rob Bell:
And Doggerland has never recovered since.

Do we know how long ago that was, the slide?

Mike Sowden:
Yes, it was 6,225 to 6,170 BC.

I just said this off the top of my head.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Sowden:
But that's when they reckon it happened and it can be seen in the geological record.

And that's happened on our doorstep.

Jono Hey:
It doesn't have quite as cool a name as the Zanclean Megaflood, does it?

There's something about Zanclean Megaflood that is just captivating by itself.

Rob Bell:
It's a trench, isn't it, near the Strait of Tribolta, which has got scientists thinking differently to what their previous theory was.

Is that still being worked out, do we know?

I mean, and how significant a discovery is that?

Mike Sowden:
Well, there's various teams have been working on it.

At the time that I wrote the Twitter thread, there was a team that was led by Daniel Garcia Castellanos.

He's essentially a geophysicist working in Barcelona.

And that was his team who was looking into these things.

They were looking at that, and they were looking at the waterfall just south of Italy.

Rob Bell:
At the Divide.

Mike Sowden:
Yes, and looking at the amount of sediment that was there.

And from that, they were making some extrapolations.

And they've been doing other things as well.

I know that scientists have been studying, like, the amount of salt that's at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has been studied for quite a while, because there is a salt layer that in places is two miles thick, two miles of salt, which is...

From all that evaporation.

That was from...

That was what pointed towards the Macedian salinity crisis, which is what kind of started off the process of evaporation.

So all these things have been studied for a while, but it's just the speed of it that is so novel.

And this is the thing that really...

It's great for me, because it's like I could talk about this stuff, and it was kind of cutting edge that this happened so quickly.

But it was also known about sufficiently that there was lots of material on it.

So in a way, I kind of very unfairly maybe got the scoop, you know?

And this is what really powered it.

This sense of wow was really around the speed of it.

And that's what really powered my thread as well.

So my thread was its own megaflood of people.

And that's what made my newsletters take off.

So that taught me something about making people go wow.

Jono Hey:
Before this, even though I've done the sketch and things, and I've seen your thread, I looked up an article on the Zanclean Megaflood.

And you know, it was fine.

It had some facts and some researchers at different places.

But yours was different.

And like, as I say, that article was fine.

But yours was fascinating to people.

And I'm wondering, like, what was it about what you did, which is so different than me reading an article on a university website?

Mike Sowden:
One of the things I try and do is I'm approaching this not as an expert, who was, not as a scientist, not as somebody who's studied this for the last 20 years.

And I'm approaching this not as somebody who is also pretending that they're an authority on this topic.

I'm a student, so I'm writing from a student's perspective.

Everything I write about, I'm learning as I go.

And therefore, that helps me, that calibrates me in finding the stories I want to tell, because I'm looking for my own reaction.

If I go wow, and if I can sufficiently convey that feeling of, oh, I can't believe this, you know, if I can convey that in words, then that I feel confident that thread will take off, because I'm, because, you know, social media is so much of it's powered by emotion.

So I'm sharing, I'm sharing science stories and facts, but I'm really, I'm really leaning into that, that wow, that reaction, I'm trying to get out people because it's really important.

Because when you go wow, you have a little moment just for a second of thinking, wow, the world is more interesting than I ever knew.

And it's filled with all this stuff that I never knew, I never knew.

If you, if people have enough of those moments throughout the day, throughout their day, and they have enough of those wows and enough of that kind of, this is so interesting, there's all this stuff out there I never, I never even contemplated could exist.

Then it's, it's a source of hope.

And it actually makes you just, it kind of puts a spring in your step and it helps you, just in a very small way, it helps you deal with all the other stuff.

Because the opposite of that feeling is the world is just a great big mechanical machine filled with things I already understand.

And it's all kind of depressing and there's nothing really to look forward to.

And I'm never gonna feel like a child again, because when you're a kid, everything is amazing.

And I think exactly and everything's new.

But the fact is that even as an adult, everything is new if you look hard enough.

Yes.

Rob Bell:
Yes, yes, yes, Mike.

Very well said.

Jono Hey:
Mike, I think when you described your newsletter at one point, it's full of like curiosity, wonder, weirdness, and hope.

I'm curious about all four adjectives and how it comes.

It's a really lovely mix.

Mike Sowden:
I recognize from when I was a trouble writer that you have to make people, you have to surprise people all the time in order to really get their attention.

One of the ways that you can surprise people is make them laugh.

The weirdness is like I need to have that level of giving people something they weren't quite expecting.

So I'm always looking for something that a wow reaction is that.

But it's also weird, like somebody's crazy uncle.

You never quite know what they're going to say next.

That's very much where I want to end up.

I want to be the equivalent of turning up at 3am and saying, hey, let's all go fishing.

It's that kind of thing.

Rob Bell:
You've put surprising in a new context for me there, Mike.

It's making me think a lot about my own writing, my own work presenting, wherever it might be.

I am going to keep hold of that and see where it takes me.

Lovely way of thinking about it, Mike.

Thank you.

Jono Hey:
Rob, can I ask you because when I thought about Mike coming on the podcast, I thought this is brilliant because Mike is like telling science stories and the stories behind the science and perhaps science that you didn't know or you hadn't noticed was there.

I feel like you've done that so much in particular with engineering, but also like the history of engineering and telling the stories behind the development of things.

I'm curious to see what you think when you think about your experience of not so much science but with engineering, but maybe doing a similar thing to what Mike's been doing with TV, I don't know.

Rob Bell:
Firstly, I work with some brilliant storytellers who help shape the scripts and write the scripts.

More often than not, that's the director.

And so I work with some fantastic directors who are so good at drawing the audience along the narrative with you and keeping them intrigued and keeping them wanting to know more.

I've learned a lot from them as I'm starting to write some more of my own, kind of more strict scripts for some other projects.

And indeed, from Mike as well, who has an online course on storytelling.

The second thing I was going to say about that is that I feel there's a bit of a difference between science and engineering because with engineering, there's a human element.

Science, there are scientists who make discoveries and make experiments, but a lot of science has come from nature that's happening.

Whereas engineering is more humans who have made that happen.

And a wonderful period of engineering history that I'm interested in, the Industrial Revolution, the whole world was being driven forwards by the engineering that was being created.

And you could say that again for future industrial revolutions that have happened and are happening.

There's this purpose behind it.

There's purpose and a lot of the time that's a social purpose behind it.

And so the stories can be more human, which often make them more intriguing or more compelling to other humans, because you can bring in that feeling of the emotion and you can feel in that human purpose behind it, which a lot of science doesn't necessarily have.

It's more of the natural world purpose.

Does that make sense?

Jono Hey:
I can totally see what you mean about the engineering by definition has people involved.

But I feel like although we haven't really talked about it with Zanclean Megaflood, a lot of the writing that you've done has focused on the scientists themselves as well, and how some of these discoveries came about.

I think that's also one of the bits which I've really enjoyed.

Maybe I was thinking where some of the weirdness comes, because some of the characters in science seem kind of unusual, because they're really fascinated by something.

And they're going further than would appear normal from the outside.

But I sort of feel that you do tell the, you're not normally just telling the science, but you're usually connecting with the people.

Is that right, Mike?

Mike Sowden:
Yeah, I'm always trying to, it's funny, as you were saying that, I was thinking of scientists as deeply obsessive people, which they are.

They become incredibly enthusiastic about what they're studying.

And then they start to apply that kind of obsession that you see in people like Brendan Leonard and Al Humphreys, you know, going off and climbing mountains.

And I've met Al.

I haven't met Brendan.

I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Brendan yet.

But both of them are so determined when they get doing their thing.

And I really admire that.

And at the same time, I also know that they are, they're just deeply normal human beings.

So I'm really fascinated with this side of people, you know, generally, with scientists, adventurers, everything.

And anything who has a deep passion, there is this side where they can see an opportunity to go deeper into this thing than maybe anyone else hasn't ever done.

But at least, you know, deeper into it than they have ever done.

And then they really focus and they really throw themselves at it.

And they put themselves through all amounts of discomfort.

I mean, Newton was doing some absolutely ridiculous things to himself.

When he was studying optics, he got a needle, a blunt needle, and he poked it into his eye socket so he could deform his eye.

I know, it's just to see how it would change the optics.

And it almost made him blind.

And his friends were saying, why did you do that?

I mean, you know, I guess his answer would have been, well, science, obviously, you know.

I'm just fascinated.

That is the human story behind science for me.

It's these people who are just seeing this fascinating side to the world.

And then they go, okay, I'm going to chase this rabbit hole as far as it goes.

And sometimes that can be to the expense of other parts of their life, which turns into a really good story.

Let's face it.

Jono Hey:
Geology does that for me a lot.

It's interesting to go back again to Bill Bryson with the short history of nearly everything.

One of the things he did was tell the stories of the people who came up with these theories in the first place.

One of them that is, in some ways, the most mind-blowing is the whole idea of continental drift and plate tectonics, and the idea that you could be walking across this gentle hill in northern England and think that at one point this thing was at the bottom of an ocean or that it was the other side of the planet.

What I remember getting from that book was the people stories that you have this somebody who does a map and they're like incredibly diligent about its data collection and everything.

And everything in some ways looks super dry.

It's like this rock is kind of like this rock, which is quite far away, you know, so what?

And then you say, and so I think all of the continents are drifting and we were once at the bottom of the sea and this is made up of shells.

And that mountain range didn't exist.

And you're like, don't be silly.

You know, like that kind of fascination, but also the, I don't know, the guts or the intensity or the integrity or whatever it was from these scientists.

To have the gall to say, no, I think this continent wasn't even here.

Or like this mountain range, this used to be a mountain range.

I just think those are quite staggering.

I think I get some of that from your science writing, Mike, and I really love that.

That's like, how did these people suggest this?

Or what was it like when we didn't know this?

Everybody knows this now.

But at some point, they didn't know this and they thought this.

I was reading, my dad has written a few science books.

A bit more on the engineering side or in computer science and things.

He was writing one where he was talking about different theories of heat.

What is energy?

What is heat?

There were all these competing theories of like, heat was this stuff that was in the air and then got used up when you burned it.

What seemed like really fanciful theories, but actually nobody had better ideas at the time of what it was.

And so to come in and say, no, I think it's this is it might seem obvious now, but it totally wasn't obvious at the time.

Anyway, when I think of the wonder and the weirdness and the characters, and maybe the hope as well, I think it's like you're writing and telling the stories of the scientists who were brave enough to propose these mental things of the Zanclean.

Mike Sowden:
But isn't that one of the great human skills to imagine something that fits all the pieces together and the imagining of it is part of a collaboration with reality to make that thing real?

I mean, isn't that true in engineering?

You know, it's like you, yes?

So that is a human skill to use our imaginations in this incredibly powerful and active way, you know, with real agency, with real, you're putting your opinion into the world and you're saying this could be a thing.

And then you measure up how realistic that is.

And science is really kind of like saying, I have a hypothesis.

Okay, let's test it.

If it manages to survive the testing, then maybe it's right or maybe it's closer to being right.

And that's really, so it all starts with these great feats of imagination.

So I love that about science, the people who dared to dream and then they allowed themselves to be put into the awful, hurtful, agonizing process of having their dream torn apart to see if it's right.

Rob Bell:
I have a question come back about the Zanclean Megaflood.

Do we know if there have been other geological events that have happened on this scale that of course, there was this rapid rate or as rapid a rate of changing the face of the earth.

Is there anything comparable?

Mike Sowden:
There is.

Rob Bell:
I mean, what springs to mind is extinction of dinosaurs, right?

The asteroid impact.

Mike Sowden:
Yes.

And there was stuff recently about that.

They were looking at the projected size of the tidal wave that was caused by that.

That was on a scale.

I can't remember what that was.

But it was something like, you know, that massive tidal wave in the film Interstellar?

It was higher than that.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Mike Sowden:
So it was like absolutely insane.

But there was some, and I don't know the details, but I have been referred to it many times.

There's in ancient geological history, there's the Missoula floods in the States, and they are very much on the same scale.

Rob Bell:
Oh, yeah.

Jono Hey:
Is that where you can see the fields of Eastern Washington State are sort of rippled, like the surface of a seabed, but on a massive scale?

Like you might see like ripples on a beach, but they're ripples in the hillside, because these repeatedly have had, is it like the Great Lakes or something like that, have repeatedly broken and washed over?

Mike Sowden:
I think that's it.

But unfortunately, since I haven't written about it, I'm a complete idiot on this topic.

So it's one of those examples where, if I'm giving an anecdote at a party, this is the point where I rapidly change the subject.

So I'm just admiring a bookcase, Jono.

It's a very nice bookcase.

Rob Bell:
And I'm assuming like volcanic events as well, I guess, volcanic eruptions may have caused change on the face of the earth.

Mike Sowden:
Absolutely.

I mean, volcanic eruptions have caused climate changes really quite dramatically.

But there's also things like, really interesting thing, the Romans, the Romans used to mine silver.

So the Romans mined so much silver that there's actually traces of the pollution from that mining in ice cores from Greenland.

You know, so it's like everything is connected.

You know, you have these events that happen in history, and there are traces of them, you know, all over the place.

I recently learned about, okay, this is big scale mode again.

Underneath Hawaii is a hotspot.

A hotspot is a very, very hot area of rock, and it's an upswelling of all this energy, and it's creating the islands of Hawaii.

Now, what's been interesting is that if you look at the islands of Hawaii, and you look at the ancient islands that have now been covered by the sea, they're in a chain, so the hotspot hasn't moved.

So, it's almost like a blowtorch being applied to the surface of the earth from underneath, and as Hawaii has moved, it's made kind of bubbling, and that's the Hawaiian chain of islands.

Now, these hotspots exist at great depth in many places, but what is weird about them is that they seem to be generating heat in the way they shouldn't.

Now, one of the theories that Geologists call these blobs, but these blobs, it's theorized, only theorized that these may be chunks of a Mars-sized planet that very, very early in Earth's history smashed into the earth and left parts of itself deep in the earth.

So, these are actually chunks of alien planet stuck within the earth.

This planet is called Theia, and this is what they're speculating at the moment.

Obviously, there's no way of checking because this is at a depth of thousands of miles under our feet.

So, there's no direct way of checking.

But it seems that Earth was hit by a very large planet early on in its history, and this could be the reason it's a different type of rock.

Now, this nicely ties in.

If you're writing a fantasy novel, one of the tropes of fantasy novels is, oh, my sword is made out of an alien metal.

Well, there's your scientific basis for it.

It's literally, it could be that we have alien rock, alien metals underneath our feet, and some of them could be upwelling.

So, there's sciences discovering all these things that just set your mind alight.

Rob Bell:
It's wonderful.

Listen, I appreciate we've been talking for a little while here, Mike.

We've had your time.

Is there anything anyone would like to add before we round out this episode on the Zanclean Megaflood and fascination of science writing more generally?

Jono Hey:
Can I ask you a question?

I know what my process is to make sketches these days, but as I said, when I looked up the Zanclean Megaflood article on some university website, it had none of that excitement or fascination or story in it.

But I don't think it's just in the telling.

I was curious about how you go about researching your stories, because everybody can read the Wikipedia article and you'll find that pretty quick.

But it's difficult, I think, sometimes not to just regurgitate a textbook or the Wikipedia stuff when everything you're learning is necessarily like secondhand or even thirdhand sometimes.

I was wondering how you go from, oh, this looks curious to like writing something which is really fascinating and sounds like it's new and nobody's written it in this way before.

Mike Sowden:
I'm just leaving out silence because I listened to your episode about silences.

So I've been thinking about that ever since.

That's good.

Jono Hey:
That's lovely.

Mike Sowden:
I'm thinking about how uncomfortable.

Rob Bell:
Do you know what I loved about that is that I could see a slight amount of discomfort in Jono, which never happens because he is the most comfortable leaving a silence.

Nice one, Mike.

Mike Sowden:
My process really is I read a lot of things and I'm always looking for that.

I don't know what it is exactly, but it really is a reaction within myself.

It's that point where it's not just interesting, it feels like a part of a greater whole that I really care about.

I'm always trying to entertain.

Sometimes I'll think, okay, that'd be a really great thing to write about because I can tie in that ridiculous story about that time that I was sailing and I fell off a boat and then I ended up washed off on this tidal island, you know.

So I'm always trying to tie it in with something that I already know that I know has a certain amount of entertainment value.

So part of the joy really is the connection between things.

And that really I feel like is that's part of where you can discover your originality as well.

So sometimes I can see that when I read a little story and I say, oh, that fits with that.

It's like a jigsaw puzzle.

And it's not quite complete in my head.

So I find a piece of that puzzle.

And I guess in this analogy, I've got like 20 different jigsaw puzzles that are half assembled.

I'll go, oh, that goes there.

But sometimes it's just literally, I'll just go, oh, I've got to write about this because it made me go wow so much.

Jono Hey:
And I think that like the magic of the way you do it is that it means that people actually do read it because you can read the Wikipedia page, but nobody really does because they'll probably stop halfway and it's just not interesting.

But if you keep it interesting all the way and you show the wonder of it, then people actually learn this stuff.

So I think it's brilliant.

Mike Sowden:
Especially with stuff going on in the States at the moment with funding being removed from the sciences, my job has become more critical in that I can provide, I'm not saying my job is particularly critical, but I can at least be useful to scientists who have all this great research and they're looking for somebody who can kind of string a story together in a way that's kind of accessible.

So I really want to be that person for my scientist heroes.

And I would love to just be more of a platform for people who have such really interesting research and they want to get it out there.

And they're willing to be represented by this idiot who has his own newsletter who will listen to them and not hopefully mangle the headline too much or over promise something or dumb it down too much.

But yeah, I just want to get the public interested in the things that I see in the sciences that are just not getting appreciated enough.

Rob Bell:
I was going to ask what your favorite almost nuts story that you've brought to read to date, Mike.

Mike Sowden:
I think that's probably the fact that if you stare at your own reflection for about 10 minutes without moving your eyes, you'll start to hallucinate and see all sorts of very weird things.

This is because our eyes tune out things that are that they essentially deem unimportant, which are usually things that aren't moving.

So if you stare at your own reflection, your eyes will, your nervous system will tune out what you're looking at and it will fill in the gap because your brain will be at war with itself.

Your eyes will be saying, there's nothing there.

Your brain will be saying, of course there's something there.

You're an idiot.

And so they'll go to war and they'll fill in with your imagination and you will start to hallucinate animals, people that you, you know, people that are no longer with you in the world, celebrities, all sorts of strange things.

So if you stare at your own reflection for 10 minutes without moving your eyes.

Rob Bell:
Well, that sorted my tea break tomorrow, Mike.

Lovely.

Jono Hey:
Have you tried it, Mike?

Mike Sowden:
I have not tried it.

I'm scared to, frankly.

Rob Bell:
Well, I'm going to do that.

Jono Hey:
That's how I was going to schedule it in.

Rob Bell:
Listen Mike, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your contagious enthusiasm, I'll say, for awesome stories like this.

Mike Sowden:
Absolute pleasure.

Rob Bell:
Both of Zanclean Megaflood and all the others that you've shared with us on the podcast.

I mentioned at the very top of the show your newsletter, Everything Is Amazing.

We've mentioned it a couple of times through the podcast as well.

What's the best way for people to find that and to subscribe to that?

If what they've heard has peeped their curiosity and they want to know more.

Mike Sowden:
Yeah, if you go to everythingisamazing.substack.com, that's where I'm currently hosted.

I'm Mikeachim, M-I-K-E-A-C-H-I-M on threads and I'm on Blue Sky as well.

Rob Bell:
They're the places where people can follow your curiosity and your writing.

Mike Sowden:
Those are the main places, yeah.

Rob Bell:
Any other projects on the go at the moment that you guys share with us?

Mike Sowden:
I'm trying to fight my way through the stuff that I'm already committed to so I can start writing a book.

Rob Bell:
Oh, great.

Mike Sowden:
I've got all sorts of ideas but I would love to write something about opinion because opinion gets in the way of curiosity.

When you form an opinion, your curiosity stops.

So much of our world is powered by opinion and scientists, they can be quite skeptical about opinion because it's a scientist's job to see what the evidence tells us.

So if you form an opinion before the evidence has finished telling you what it's going to tell you, then opinion gets in the way of conjuring up something new.

So I've got lots I want to think and write about in this regard.

Rob Bell:
There you go.

Watch this space.

Watch this space.

Mike, I feel like there'll be whole days lost at a pub table chatting with you.

Mike Sowden:
It'll always be a pleasure.

Rob Bell:
I mean that in a good way.

A very good way.

Thank you so much again for coming on.

Mike Sowden:
Really, really appreciate it.

Absolute pleasure.

Thank you, guys.

Jono Hey:
Thank you, Mike.

Rob Bell:
Thank you, Jono.

And thank you all for listening.

We hugely appreciate your interest in the podcast.

And if you know others who you think might also enjoy it, then please tell them about it.

We're up on all good podcast playing platforms, or you can send them along to the podcast website at podcast.sketchplanations.com.

You can have a good look through our back catalogue and see the sketches in full up there.

As we sign off, once again, I'm curiously more motivated than ever to double check that dripping tap in the bathroom.

Until next time, go well, stay well.

Goodbye.

Jono Hey:
Cheers.

Rob Bell:
All music on this podcast series is provided by the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find many more tracks at franccinelli.com.