Random Places That Sank Into the Sea (15 items)

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  (#10) Saeftinghe

  • Netherlands

  In late medieval times, before it was best known as “The Drowned Land of Saeftinghe,” the village of Saeftinghe in the Netherlands was a vibrant community (complete with a castle) settled strategically close to the Antwerp harbor. Nature and war, however, had other plans: centuries of heavy storms, combined with a pierced dike during the Eighty Years' War, drowned the city in 1584 with corrosive saltwater.
  
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  (#2) Solomon Islands

  • Oceania

  Entire islands are disappearing in the Pacific Ocean in the Solomon Islands archipelago. Five, in fact, have sank into the ocean in the past seven decades thanks to rising sea levels. And that's not all: the remaining islands (900+) are being swallowed, slowly, by the sea, with six of them losing more than 20% of their surface area in the same time span, forcing generations of families from their homes and damaging local economies.

  
  
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  (#3) Port Royal

  • Jamaica

  Now largely under 40 feet of water, Port Royal, Jamaica, used to be known as "“the most wicked and sinful city in the world," complete with pirates (including the real Captain Morgan), prostitutes, and an extraordinarily potent spirit known as "Kill Devil Rum." That all changed when an earthquake in 1692 sucked most of the city into the ocean, killing around 2000 people and prompting wide-scale looting and violence among the survivors. The lost city is now considered to be a rich archaeological marvel, drawing comparisons to Pompeii.

   
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  (#14) Bezidu Nou, Romania

  The Romanian village of Bezidu Nou was flooded in 1988 to make a dam, destroying the town and partially submerging it under the artificial Lake Bezid. Today, only parts of the village's two churches are visible.
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  (#11) Villa Epecuén

  Established as a resort town in the 1920s, Villa Epecuen, Argentina, is a perpetually flooded ghost town (population: 1 as of 2011) after an earthen dam burst in 1985. The saltwater has slowly been eating the the abandoned town ever since, with left-behind vehicles, beds, toilets, and other domestic props left to slowly rot. The water began to recede in 2009, exposing the decayed settlement that used to be home for more than 5,000 Argentinians.
   
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  (#7) Sarah Ann Island

  A small guano-covered island south of Hawaii, Sarah Ann Island "vanished beneath the waves" sometime between 1858 and 1937, when German astronomers tried and failed to find it and establish an observatory in which to better view that year's solar eclipse. Sarah Ann was discovered and claimed by an American "guano firm" that hoped to mine the island's resources (read: bird poop) for saltpeter and fertilizer.

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