The core beneath your town
When Romania's last volcano erupted, people had already reached this land
Pick your town and go down beneath it through time, layer by layer: stones that fell from the sky, ice in the Apuseni, the cave bear, the volcano, the man from Oase, a lake the size of a sea, the island of the dinosaurs. Down to where the ground beneath you lay hundreds of kilometres further south.
The column on the left is the core: a cylinder like the ones drills bring up, but made of time. The deeper you go, the more time a centimetre of it holds.
144 years ago
Stones on the snow
The first layer is thin. On 3 February 1882, a Friday, at 15:45, a fireball crossed the sky over Cluj and broke apart above the villages around Mociu, 309 km from București. The stones fell on snow.
A professor weighed them soon after the fall. The page on the stone shower also shows how the weight of the big stone went wrong along the way, in an American paper of 1961.
The Mociu stone rain, 3 February 1882: the map, the stones, the museums
about 810 years ago
The oldest dated oak
We go down a few centuries. The Cajvana oak, 364 km from București, would have sprouted around the year 1200. Radiocarbon dating, plus an estimate of the wood missing from the middle of the trunk, gives it about 810 years.
The famous “Old Man of the Carpathians” at Mercheașa is 900 years old in the papers and about 560 by radiocarbon. The ages in the papers do not always survive the lab.
9,300 years ago
The sea that was a lake
9,300 years ago, the Black Sea, which today reaches Constanța, 203 km from București, was a freshwater lake cut off from the ocean. One team calculated that once the sill gave way, it was all over within 40 years at most. That is one team's verdict, not the end of the argument: other teams read the same seabed differently, and the page on Romania 20,000 years ago puts the arrival of salt water at about 8,400 years.
Today the sea has two floors. Below 100–150 metres the water has no oxygen at all, and it keeps the wood of ships for thousands of years: the oldest intact wreck known is at least 2,400 years old.
The Black Sea has two floors. Nothing downstairs breathes oxygen
at least 10,500 years ago
The ice that remembers winters
In Scărișoara Cave, 344 km from București, lies a block of ice of about 100,000 cubic metres. In 2003 a 22.53-metre core went through it to the bedrock. Its base is at least about 10,500 years old; a 1980 guidebook said 3,500.
The 10,500 years are the modelled age of the base, not an exactly dated annual layer. The ice kept an archive of winters: the mildest were about 7,000–5,000 years ago. Between May and July 2019 about 1,050 cubic metres of it melted.
20,000 years ago
The cold steppe
20,000 years ago the plains were cold steppe with elements of tundra, swept by wind and covered in the dust that became the loess of the Bărăgan and Dobruja. In the Retezat, the glaciers had reached their largest extent about 21,000 years ago.
The Black Sea was a lake about 105 metres below today's level. Near Piatra Neamț, at Poiana Cireșului, hunters left a bone flute in their camp.
26,100–24,300 years ago
The giant that ate plants
Across Europe, the cave bear dies out 26,100–24,300 years ago, according to more than 200 dates. Males weighed 400–500 kilograms. The bones of six bears from the Carpathians, 28,000–48,000 years old, say they ate plants; they do not say which.
At Chișcău, 365 km from București, the guides tell of bears trapped in the cave 15,000 years ago. The excavations make the bears there more than 10,000 years older than the story.
27,000–32,000 years ago
The last eruption
In the core, this is where the ash goes. Ciomadul, the last volcano to erupt on what is now Romania, 189 km from București, last erupted 27,000–32,000 years ago. “30,000” is a rounding of a range.
“Extinct” is only a convention for a volcano that has not erupted for more than 10,000 years. Under the crater, the instruments point to partly molten rock, with at least 5–15 per cent melt. The studies do not point to an imminent eruption, and none of them can predict one.
40,440 years ago
People were already here
Another ten thousand years down, we meet a person. Oase 1, a man whose remains were found near Anina, 343 km from București, is dated to 40,440 ± 1,030 years ago. He carried 6–9% Neanderthal DNA, from an ancestor who had lived 4–6 generations before him.
So the core runs in this order: first the people, then the volcano. As the page on Ciomadul puts it: “When Ciomadul erupted, modern humans had already reached Romania.” The Oase jaw is older than the last eruption by several thousand years.
2,500,000 years ago
The sealed cave
Now we jump a long way. Near Mangalia, 209 km from București, clay and loess covered the limestone that holds Movile Cave, 2.5 million years ago, and the cave was left with no natural entrance.
Fifty-two species of invertebrates live in it, 37 of them found only in the cave and its aquifer, fed by microbes that draw energy from sulfur and methane. Our species is about 300,000 years old: the seal is more than eight times older than we are.
about 3.2 million years ago
The trunks near you
The oldest securely dated mammoth remains in Europe come from Tulucești (Galați) and Cernătești (Dolj): about 3.2 million years. The underlying study could not be consulted, and no radiocarbon date was found for any mammoth from Romania.
On the elephant page's map, the find closest to București is Colentina (now a Bucharest district), 5 km away: “Elephas antiquus”, variety ausonius (1924 identification). Behind it is a paper or a database. It may be far younger than this layer: the finds on the map run from the Miocene to the ice age.
Elephants, mammoths and deinotheres in Romania: what was found in your county
11.6 million years ago
The largest lake
About 11.6 million years ago the last straits closed and Paratethys was left as a lake of 2.8 million square kilometres, a little larger than today's Mediterranean. On the published map of its highest level, laid over today's, the lake covers about 81.5% of Romania.
From Miocene layers too, millions of years old, comes the mud at Berca, 110 km from București. Methane pushes it up from about 3,000 metres down. It looks as if it were boiling, but it is cold.
70 million years ago
The island of dwarf dinosaurs
At Sânpetru, in the Sibișel valley, 280 km from București, bones stick out of the valley banks. 70 million years ago the place was on an island at 27–28° north, roughly the latitude of today's Canary Islands.
An adult long-necked dinosaur there weighed less than a tonne. Above the dinosaurs flew a reptile with wings estimated at 10–12 metres from tip to tip. For some of them researchers disagree: perhaps their ancestors were already small, and the island only kept them that way.
100 million years ago
Your town was not here
Here the core parts company with the map. The ground under București, today at 44.4° N, lay 100 million years ago between 29.6° and 37.6° N: 760–1,650 km further south. Roughly the latitude of Cairo and Athens today.
All the numbers come from three published models, and each puts Romania somewhere else. The decimals do not show how well we know the past position. But all three take you south.
200 million years ago
The footprints at Anina
Almost at the bottom. In a quarry at Colonia Cehă, near Anina, a 2009 study reports sauropod footprints from the Hettangian, at the start of the Jurassic.
Further down the models drift even further apart: at 200 million years, București is at 20.9° N according to Müller and at 41.9° N according to Merdith. The core stops here.