Earthquake-triggered landslides and mudflows: Was this the wave that engulfed Ancient Helike?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The destruction of Ancient Helike in 373 BC as reported by ancient Greek and Roman writers is inconsistent with modern evidence on the geological context. The classical view of a strong earthquake, similar to the 1817 M = 6.6 earthquake and followed by a giant tsunami wave that permanently inundated the ruined city does not stand up to modern scrutiny. Evidence for co-seismic slip on the Helike Fault at that time and for a corresponding tsunami have already been shown to be lacking, and the archaeological evidence shows that part of the site was reoccupied within 40 years. New observations on outcrops, excavated sites, and boreholes show that at least two mudflow deposits several metres thick of slightly gravelly mud overlie 4th c. BC archaeological remains on the Katourlas fan. Upstream, landslides are common in the 4 km 2 river basin and could have dammed the ephemeral Katourlas River. Relics of this dam are still recognised in the riverbed as a knickpoint. Temporary damming of rivers by earthquake-triggered landslides is a common phenomenon in northern Peloponnese. The destruction of Ancient Helike appears to have been a localised non-linear cascading series of disasters, with a strong earthquake followed by a destructive mudflow generated by breaching of a landslide-dammed lake in the Katourlas basin. Historical records of flooding from the west may record another landslide dam followed by a more watery flood in the Selinous River. We propose that it was mudflows and floods from inland rather than a tsunami from the sea that contributed to the final destruction of Helike.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".