Pralay'ji. Thanks for pointing that out. Yes, sea levels would have been low and even now RamaSethu is 3ft deep mostly and just 30 ft deep in some places. Legend has it that up until 1480 the RamaSethu existed and one could pass to Sri Lanka using that bridge.pralay wrote:Disha ji,disha wrote:It must have been a super-human engineering feat to bridge two large land mass.
If you take into account the sea-level of those times, it clearly was not a super-human thing.
The sea-level has been rising continuously since past glacial maximum, and most probably the setu back then was not too long,
Most of the submerged part would be above water in those times, as its just few feet shallow in most of the places along the setu-path in sea.
The actual bridge would be few hundred meters or even less at max.
We need to put more faith in Ramayana and the story of construction.
Rama was looking for a way to pass his army to Sri Lanka. Legend has it that he was angry with Varuna and Varuna later turns up and states that the Sea will not disturb his building of land bridge. To me, Varuna reveals Rama the appropriate time to build the land bridge. Definitely not in the monsoon.
Periaswamy'ji., you are going in circles - for once please look at this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumice_raft and also this link http://www.iflscience.com/physics/scien ... es-float-/ and read this https://www.wired.com/2012/08/the-biolo ... ice-rafts/periaswamy wrote: I am not particularly interested in tying the rocks to the story. These rocks are not floating right now, so it is pretty safe to assume that they did not "float" in the past -- in order to float, these rocks would have to be less dense than water, in which case they should not have stayed in place with rising and falling sea levels over 1000s of years. If these are not light rocks, then it stands to reason that it must have taken a lot of effort to move these heavy rocks across a 30 miles stretch from some point on land.
What can be validated is that these rocks exist right now, and are around 7000 years old. So one question I has was if it was pumice, which is of low density, how it managed to stay in the same place without sort of drifting along with some currents over time. I am able to see some screen shots of a book by a scientist from the Indian Geological Society who had studied these rocks and came up with the same age of 7000 years (well before this popular science report). There must be some explanation for why rocks that are not too heavy manage to stay in the same place over a bed of sand. A bed of sand has peculiar properties like the one in this link.
Here is something that clarifies things for you hopefully:
1. Pumice rocks float and also sink preferentially. Pumice rocks keep on floating, or initially float and then sink based on changes in their mineral or biological content on its interaction with the environment.
The above property of pumice rocks is a physical property that is inviolable. That is, pumice rocks floated in past, present and will do so in future. And some pumice rocks sink as the water, particularly salt water changes its mineral or biological (or both) contents. This was true in past, in present and will be so in future.
2. One cannot assume that there never was a land bridge based on pumice just because some of the rocks floated away and some of the rocks sank. And even if the rocks are mined from the same mine., their individual properties is determined based on the vein in the rock.
Also one cannot assume that the land bridge was only pumice. Ramayana clearly states that first the rocks sank and then when the name of Rama was written on the rocks, it started to float. In other words all rocks with the name Rama on it floated. Or all rocks that could float were marked with the name of Rama.
3. Hence the story of Ramayana where the rocks floated on sea water cannot be laughed away. In fact, given the scientific evidence, the story of Ramayana and RamaSethu goes from plausible to true. Also the dating of Ramayana is now constricted to a narrow band of 5000 BCE to 3000 BCE.
4. There will be discussions on the optimal material used for RamaSethu and how it was built. But there is no contention on its reality.