Anatolia

History

The past. The ice age: a cold, dry steppe of wormwood and goosefoot, with few trees outside sheltered coastal uplands, covered the land where Anatolia’s grass and farms are now. The sea stood about 120 metres lower, so about 20,000 square kilometres of shallow sea, almost a fifth of the plate’s sea, were dry land, from the plain off Adana to the shelves around Cyprus, which was almost a quarter larger but stayed an island. The Sea of Marmara was a lake cut off from the Mediterranean, and the Dardanelles a river valley. All of it was there when the timeline begins; from 14,776 to 8,084 years ago the Mediterranean spilled back into Marmara, the sea drowned the shelf, and grass and oak woodland spread over the steppe. The lines that stand for grass and farmland turn steppe grey and the lines that stand for the sea the colour of dry land, all at once, and only across those spans.

12 million years ago

The North Anatolian Fault began to form in the east, and Anatolia started to slide west.

200,000 years ago

The North Anatolian Fault reached the Sea of Marmara, no earlier than this.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Eris et al. 2007, Marine Geology 243:57; Miebach et al. 2016, Climate of the Past 12:575; Roberts et al. 2018, Quaternary Science Reviews 184:47; Valsecchi et al. 2012, Climate of the Past 8:1941 · Sengor et al. 2005, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 33:37