William sent in the link https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/scientists-found-evidence-earthquake-big-202400221.html … a research paper in Science Advances says a newly discovered megaquake in Chile, around 3800 years ago, was so powerful it led to the abandonment of the nearby coastline for almost a thousand years. It caused a massive tsunami wave that shot across the Pacific Ocean and made landfall in New Zealand, 6000 miles away. It flung boulders on the beach hundreds of miles inland.
At https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220413131147.htm … early human habitation linked to past shifts in climate. This is an interesting piece of research but they end up by saying, climate played a fundamental role in the evolution of Homo. We are where we are because our ancestors managed to adapt over millennia to slow shifts in the climate. The study includes Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, and early African Homo [such as Homo habilus]. The timescale is between 21,000 and 400,000 years, or even longer. Climate change in this period is thought to be astronomical in origin, we are told, a reference to Milankovitch orbital changes that do take place slowly. In other words, they do not countenance the idea of rapid climate change as a result of catastrophic events. Switches, from Ice Age to Interglacial may themselves be evidence of catastrophic change in climate, but uniformitarian timescales preclude rapidity. Megaquakes, like the one in Chile, above, might also be regarded as catastrophic in nature.