FLOODS along the Bristol Channel killed nearly 2000 people in 1607, but experts still can’t agree on what caused Britain’s worst natural disaster.
The prevailing view blames a storm on 30 January 1607. However, Edward Bryant of the University of Wollongong in Australia thinks a tsunami was the real culprit. He says the tsunami hit when “the storm had peaked [and] people were beginning to go about their business”. Bryant and his colleagues studied the movement of boulders, coastal erosion and the sculpting of bedrock along the channel, and believe they could only have been caused by a tsunami (The…
