 Good morning everyone and welcome to our next press conference of EGU 23, the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. I'm Gillian D'Souza, I'm EGU's media and communications officer and I will be hosting the press conference today as well as any media interactions and interviews you would like to do following this press briefing. Today I would like to introduce our speakers in a few minutes, but just before we get into the press briefing I have to announce that unfortunately our third speaker due to unforeseen circumstances was unable to join us today. So we will only be hearing from two of our speakers today. So I apologize in advance for that. Each press conference will have time for the speakers to make their presentation and then we will follow this with a short question and answer round towards the end. And if you're joining us virtually I ask that you mute your microphones up until the end of the press conference and if you have questions at the end then we will come to you and take them in the chat or through the hand raising function on zoom. Alright, so now I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speakers so that we can have faster transitions between them. This press conference is titled from Vikings to Vienna to the Venice of the Pacific. Geo archeology elucidates history. And we are joined by two speakers in the room so on my from the left, we will be meeting Diana Hudson Bueller from the University of Vienna department of geology Vienna Austria. And we have Chuancho revision from high precision mass spectrometry and environment change laboratory. National Taiwan University Taiwan. So welcome. Thank you once again for joining us and for being here to share your findings with us. We are ready to begin and we will first hear from Chuancho. Thank you for your introduction. Here I'm going to present our study. The title of our studies dating a reward unique Pacific ruins. Look at the background background is the over 100 artificial outlets in the Pacific. So it basically is like a floating city. So it's a nickname is a bonus of the Pacific. My name is a friend, Joe, Shane, you can tell the second character to one times times like a river right so few people call me river channels difficult. Yes. So you can tell, he said, our, our side, and this is being so quite similar right, but, but when this protein city constructed actually the exact duration to nobody knows over the past 200 years. So here, we went to the field collecting symbols coral symbols. And they determine the ages and we find the history and the onset and downfall of the souther dynasty, the kingdom called souther dynasty. And this one, again, in the past over 200 years study, people believe this one based on the oral history, not in writing system develop so just the history has a generation to generations, and you couldn't tell which one is true he's wrong. He's fake. So, but basically, now we know the kingdom for solder began around the 1100 to 1300 AD, and then the downfall or a solder and then the seeds of the this brought floating city, around 1500 to sitting 100 AD. After our work, we find, actually, the ages could be the, the rise of the kingdom could be earlier than middle 11th century, and downfall collapse of the solder kingdom and the construction she is in the early 15th century. And this is our results. And you can tell this side this side is our constructed model of the Lamando. About 1000 years ago. Yeah. And here, where is the Lamando. This is located in a, on a, a, a, a, a, I don't call upon a pay in the Micronesia in Pacific Ocean. B, B, you can see the Lamando located in the southeast side of this plan pay. And the left upper side is a very view of this floating city. Yes. And the D, D is the complete constructions to consist of consists over 100. I less E is that this, this compound, this entire site is constructed with colonel, but souls and in field a color rubber fields inside. Yes. And this side has been selected as a war heritage in 2016, but the history not really know yet. And here I'm going to show you a movie about this site. And the dog is among the largest prehistoric stone complex in the Pacific. And since there are over 100 artificial islands, and there is a panel of the ancient fire and I see now the job is that they've got southeast of the country. These are not Malaysia. Yeah, this one is a I and I'll collaborate later. So, the earliest Western context in the was in the 1820s, and then people are curious about how this constructed this site. And they began, they began doing the research over the past 200 years, even do the excavations, and then charcoal floating datings. And this site was collected from the layers of the artifacts. So this indicates the human activity on the left side. And this one here is a coral, no coral charcoal sea floating ages distribution. So summarize is the one this site could constructed from 500 to 600 AD. And then this this side became the capital of the kingdom sold around 1100 to 1300 AD, and the collapse of the kingdom. And then, and, and the, the construction seized around the 1500 to 1600 AD. Yes, and this is about the best estimates estimates in the past 200 after the 200 years study, but there's a local belief suggests that actually age or Lamano will always written remain hidden. Never, never to be revealed and we believe this one, because this is very difficult topic is a good topic for us. So we went there. And two times one is a to 2016 and another one in 2018. We, we got a permit and they collected over 152 corals from the different outlets, including the one from them. King's palace and the sun from the distance to complex and other, like a typical less and also the seawall here. And then we let them determine the ages with irradiant thorium with a metric dating technique. The best age we can guess is a is a plus mass two years to signal. And, and here's the result. And we find from the zero AD is a homo sapien arrived this island. So we find local oral history said, the people went to the coast, the beach, collected living coral to build, build the structure compounds by actually the data here only 112 ages. The main 40 ages is fuzzles is that other than 018 dc here. Some, some ages around the like 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 even 7000 years old, this is fuzzle so are the local history said only in different coral use is not pretty correct. Okay, and then the, the corals distribution here after the, the homo sapien right is that that and you can kill from the, from the, there's a peak around 1055 to 1075 AD, there's a peak. This is an important indication because of the peak total we dated the nine corals nine corals or nine corals eight corals. So, from the, this two complex, the one from the king's palace. So, this is that this kingdom put put right right about before this one and we estimate it could be around the 10 to 11th century around 10, 10 to 11th century. And then, and then based on this distribution, you can tell the here 1411 no any corals here abruptly gone disappear. So this is a collapse of the kingdom by people. So, here's a conclusion again in the past people in the past people be this one. This venus of the Pacific construct it, the intense constructed from the 11 to 1300 AD actually none, not quite true could before middle 11th century, or 10th century. And downfall of the kingdom Soudar and the Mando construction seized around 1500 or city 180s, probably not correct, could be right after 1411. Yes, so our findings. And earlier about a couple century earlier than previous source. This is our study, because this one's still under review yet. So, so I did not discuss about the collapse the onset and the downfall of the kingdom and the construction history to relate it to the technique. And also climate change. This part I did that. They're missing here. Yeah, I'm a US I will briefly introduce this part. Thank you. Thank you so much. And next, we will hear from Diana Hudson Bühler. So, my name is Diana Hudson Bühler and I'm a PhD student from the University of Vienna. And in our working group, which is also together with Michael Weissel, who's here. We are working on the time from Romans the Anthropocene, especially putting a certain focus on Vienna and the area downstream of it. Finally, I will take you on a little time travel back in time. We will stay here in Vienna, but we go back to its origin in the Roman time, and I will show you how it could develop to the city to the cultural city we now know as Vienna. And for this we will go to the central Vienna Basin, what you can see here in the upper right corner we have a map of Austria we are currently in the northeast and Vienna. On the left hand side you can maybe also spot the EU symbol, which shows you where we who is currently here where we are currently sitting. And this map. This map is a topographic map it shows you the elevation of the underground above sea level. The more reddish the colors the higher elevated. For example in the eastern side we have some mountainous area and the more blueish the lower elevated. In the middle you can see a unique colored area which is bluish greenish and this is the central Vienna Basin where our story now takes place. What you can also see that to the bottom of it to the south we have a slightly elevated area. And along this margin the Danube river flows who's our main actor here. The river flows from the west to the east. And let me tell you it is very dynamic and wild river. Even though it looks like here it's just a straight line going from the left to the right it's very Mandarin River who's changing this course quite often frequently. And this was exactly the case also in Roman times. And this was also the reason why the Romans, who had their empire in the south. They founded these two cities or these two former settlements Canuntum and Vindobona Vindobona will later become Vienna. And the reason for doing this war and you can see it here in this picture on the picture you see soldiers and horses which are crossing the Danube river on ship bridges and this was. This is from a column around the second century C just to let you know C is, let's say the more modern way to say it to refer to our calendaric time point. But not just the Romans they saw the value of these two locations, but also for example Napoleon as you can see in this painting here, he used the positions to cross the Danube river, maybe an even more elaborate way. But let's come back to our settlements. I will now show you a model how these two settlements might have looked like back then. Here we have Vindobona and Canuntum and they were founded around the same time they are not too far away from each other. They have similar starting conditions with Canuntum being slightly more important. However, their development over time was completely different. Vienna became the vibrant metropolis we now know Vindobona became now Vienna, where Canuntum has ceased to exist and can be only seen in remnants in archaeological sites, even though they're quite pretty. And what we will go now through is why how could it come come to this. And for this we have to go back again to the Vienna Basin and look at the geopolitical setting. So Canuntum was the province capital of this area here you can see it by the little helmet. However, this had also certain consequences for the location. For example, it was more prone to riots being a rather large settlement. It was also more in the focus for military invasions and attacks. So the situation here was a bit tricky. Also, it was more exposed. For example, to the east there were no more or there weren't any close Roman settlements who could come to help in case of some intruders. The situation in Vindobona was slightly different. We had less potential for invasions for riots was less exposed so they could just continue living their happy Roman life. And another point which is likely to be an important factor here is the water. I mean, maybe you can already see it here. Water is quite an important thing here in Vienna with the Danube River. And we had also more access to water here. For example, from the hinterland and for the Romans, water supply was essential. Just think of the Roman baths, for example, but also the industry and for the city to prosper it was essential. And this was not the case in Canuntum. It was more difficult and this can be also one of the many reasons which had as a consequence that the province capital position and other privileges were switched to Vindobona. And Canuntum has ceased to exist over time because it couldn't recover from all the attacks it experienced. And by the 15th century, Canuntum was no more. Vindobona survived and it continued to be a little settlement. Also until the 10th century when we had a new ruler here. And this new ruler he invested into fortification. And in case you're in Vienna, you can still see some remnants of the city walls and they have become a crucial factor again to help the city to survive. Because later, for example, in the 15th century, we had attacks from the Ottoman Empire later on also by the Hungarian, but Vindobona could still survive. However, what has been a survivor factor has shown to be the rather limiting factor for the city. So in the 19th century, there were some more construction sites going on. Exposure was not more important, but the fortification, they were just restricting the city and preventing it to further flourish. And had also some other consequences. So a natural, more or less natural result was the removal of the fortification and certain other constructions, for example, also the river regulations to get control over this dynamic river and to also control its course. This was also later followed by dam regulation, which further influenced this river in some way or another. Now we arrive at the second half of the 20th century. Vindobona has now become the metropolis Vienna or is at least on the way to it. And this is exactly the time when we had the great acceleration. Everything is becoming faster and faster. We have more, we have more living room being constructed more industrial sites, but also more impact in the environment and the city is just growing and growing. And this is also the, this coincides with the proposed starting point of the Anthropocene, which is a discussed time unit, which basically says that the human fingerprint has arrived in geology. So we basically look at rocks and sand. And so far human fingerprint was not too important here. But this is not the case anymore. And I can show you, and this can be already seen in this area here. For example, this picture is from is an outcrop close, not too far away from what used to be Canuntum. And what you can see here, a sudden change in the upper one meter where we can see clear human impact in form of a pot and form of plastic. But this is also seen on a larger scale. For example, again, here in the area of Heimburg, which is close to where Canuntum used to be, was entire mountains, they are just shoveled away. And again, coming back to the great acceleration for geologists, this would take many thousands, millions of years to just get close to removing an entire mountain. But we humans, we are way faster this and this is also what we want to do. We want to understand how fast are we, how far do we go, and can we also use it to see how the future of Vienna might look like. Thank you very much. We are ready to move on to the next part of our press conference today, which is the question and answer round. So if we have any questions now I open the floor to journalists, both present in the room and those joining us online. Please raise your hand if you have some questions for our speakers and I will come to you with the microphone. And if you do have questions and introduce yourself and feel free to ask your question. I will just give it another minute, maybe if anyone would like to ask something. All right, so it doesn't look like we have questions today. Clearly our speakers explained all of their findings rather too well. Thank you so much again for joining us today. We really appreciate it. And we are now ready to conclude this press conference, the recording of the entire press briefing will be uploaded to ease us official YouTube channel later today or first thing tomorrow. So stay tuned for that. I would also like to remind you that we have our last press conference of easy 23 scheduled for later today at 2pm, the title of which is was impact oceans sands and people. So I look forward to seeing some of you there and have a rest. Have a good rest of the easy 23 week. Thank you all.