“We are here,
in these dunes,
alive in paradise”

Professor M. Doğan Kantarcı, ecologist, forestry and soil scientist at the University of Istanbul, ended the interview (made public here only in part) about his work in “Gebekum”, with the following sentence:

“In the Koran it’s written that “There is life after death.” When we are dead we will either go to heaven (paradise) or hell. However, we are here, in these dunes, alive in paradise. That’s why I always come back here.”

MDK: It was in 1988. I made a side trip to the Datça peninsula with German and Austrian scientists as part of a tour of Turkey. We also visited the dune landscape of “Gebekum”, which I knew nothing about at that time. In February 1989 we were doing research into snow and air pollution in the Taurus mountains before coming here to make specific plant classifications. This is naturally best carried out in spring, when the plants are flowering. It was then that we heard the name “Gebekum” for the first time, which at the time I took to be a dialect adulteration of the word “göbel” (= a small hillock as defined by farmers).

PK: However you don’t have anything against continuing to use the term”Gebekum”(= pregnant sand)?

MDK (laughing): Our colleague Olus Erol soon established the fact that in this dune landscape we were dealing with fossil sand, similiar to that already discovered by the archaelogical excavations at the sites of Knidos and on the eastern edge of Datça. We found “swimming stones”, highly porous shingle, that could only have come from the eruption of the volcano on Nisyros, part of the nearby Greek chain of islands known as the Dodekanes. The dramatic question for us was: How did these volcanic swimming stones come to be in these dunes which are up to five meters high?

MDK: Swimming stones are so light, that they can float on seawater. Several million years ago in the Pliocene epoch at the end of the Tertiary Period, the land around the Mediterranean Sea obtained its present form and the sea level at that time was, presumably, because of other climate conditions, approximately six meters higher than today. At the same time the mountain massives east and west of here, near Emecik and behind Datça respectively, emerged through tectonic movements of the earth. A lower, narrow area of land remained in between these two massifs, which is full of deposits from the volcano’s eruption during the Pliocene epoch approximately six million years ago around the present day site of the village of Kızlan.

This was approximately around the same time that the connection between the Agean and Black Sea at the Bosporus and the Dardanelles came into being through tectonic earth movements. The Black Sea was originally a fresh water lake. However, the entry of salt water into this ecosystem caused the extinction of all forms of life dependent on fresh water.

In the Pliocene epoch II, sand and gravel was mixed with calcium carbonate from the ground water on the present day coast in front of, and on the Kızlan plate itself. This material was turned into stone through contact with the atmosphere after the sea level sank and cemented itself to the conglomerate that we can still see in the form of plates in front of the coast. This cementation process is still continuing today and is a natural protection from sea waves for these six million old dunes.

MDK: As a forest scientist I’m principally concerned with reforestation. If we did that consistently in “Gebekum” then we would destroy the existing animal and plant life, of which several are endogenous. They only exist here in these dunes and I, as ecologist and earth scientist, want to see that they are preserved.

What we are dealing with here as I said is a fossil landscape. Should we destroy it then we could say that in the foreseeable existence of mankind on the earth, we could never observe such a landscape where we can research the history of our earth and from this learn what happened in the past. In this area of the Mediterranean Sea we can study the history of our earth up until the Pliocene epoch, the last in the Tertiary period. We shouldn’t just simply throw away this chance. In addition to the obvious scientific and research possibilities this “Natural Wonder” offers school pupils and university students the chance to study and learn about the history of their earth. This should not be lost.

And another thing: The fossil sand, which has been carried away from the dunes for many years to build houses on the Datça Peninsula, is round and not angular and therefore totally unsuitable for building. Whoever builds with this sand, has no chance, when there is a strong earthquake.

Literature:

„RESADIYE (Datça) YARIMADASINDAKI GEBEKUM KUMULUNUN ÖZELLIKLERI VE KORUNMASI ICIN ÖNERILER“, Prof. Dr. M. Dogan Kantarci, Ist. Üni., Orman Fakültesi Toprak Ilmi ve Ekoloji Abd., Istanbul, 2001

„Datça YARIMADASI KIYILARINDA KÜCÜ DENIZ CANLILARININ

OLUSTURDUKLARI KIRECTASLARININ CEVRESEL EKOLOJI YÖNÜNDEN ÖNEMI“, Prof: Dr. Oguz Erol, Ist. Üni., Deniz Bilimleri ve Cografiya Enstitütesü, Datça Yarimadasi Sempozyumu, 6-9 Haziran 1992

Prof. M. Dogan Kantarci and
Yolande Aydemir Delacuisine