Geological Effects On The Sinking City Of Byzantine Italy

Lynnette Bierbaum

Country based inquiry paper

12/16/2016

Geological Effects on the Sinking City

In 569 when the Huns began to invade Byzantine Italy. People in Padua, Altino, Oderzo and other cities began to retreat to the costal lagoons. They knew that the Hun had no intention of leaving their homes, so they had to leave their homes, start over and create what would become the city of Venice. Cassiodorus was a prefect in the Venetian praetorium, wrote “Men accustomed to limitless spaces, capable of getting about even while spaces, capable of getting about while storms raged over the sea, by using that network of routes through the lagoons by which boats seem almost to be gliding over fields, when in reality the seabed of the channels is hidden

Dendritic drainage commonly occurs when “a stream moves across sedimentary or igneous rocks that are fairly flat” (Spooner,175). As the water flows from the stream towards the ocean it collects different kinds of sediments this is called a suspended load. A suspended load carries the clay, and silt particles that are very small. One way that you can tell is when the water looks muddy. As the water flows it will leave behind some of the clay and silt particles behind in the stream, but when it gets closer to the ocean it begins to slow down and goes into something called a Delta. Deltas are “wetlands that “form as rivers empty their water and sediment into another body of water, such as ocean, lake, or another river.” (Nationalgeographic.org, 6). As the particles begin to move more slowly it makes the larger particles fall first as they enter the lagoon and the smaller particles float further in the water before settling further out into the ocean or lagoon. As long as the stream is flowing the delta just continues to grow. In Figure 1 it shows 12 of the deltas that are connected to the Venetian lagoon. The Venetian lagoon is a semi –enclosed sea due to the presence of Peninsulas or systems of barrier islands. Each of those deltas brings in sediments from the

With the moon’s strong gravitational pull it makes the earth’s water gravitate towards the moons direction. However as the bottom section of figure 2 shows, when the moon and the sun are perpendicular from each other the high tide and low tide are not as far apart, resulting in lower high tides, and higher low tides. When that occurs it is called a neap tide, and when the sun and moon are parallel with the earth and the high tide is very high, and the low tide is very low, that is called a spring tide. Although gravity is the number one cause of tides there are also some other smaller factors that can result in varying tide