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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsApollonia, the harbor of ancient Cyrene on the coast of modern Libya, was deliberately carved and built into a difficult shoreline. A 2026 study argues that tectonic uplift and later subsidence reshaped the coast, leaving the slipways on Hammam Island about 2.4 meters (roughly 8 feet) displaced downward in the researchers’ best-fit reconstruction. That is not a measured depth for every part of the harbor, and the authors do not attribute the change to one specific earthquake.
Which Apollonia is this?
This is Apollonia in Cyrenaica, on Libya’s eastern Mediterranean coast—not the better-known ancient Apollonia in modern Albania. It served as the maritime outlet and naval base of inland Cyrene, about 15 kilometers away. The port remained important for more than 1,200 years, linking the city to Mediterranean trade and supporting its agricultural exports, including silphium.
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The harbor’s story is not simply that a finished port was swallowed by the sea. Its builders reshaped a naturally awkward coast, and tectonic movements later changed the relationship between the land and water. A 2026 study in Libyan Studies revisits both parts of that history using earlier surveys, drone imagery and underwater measurements. Read the study.
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How the Greeks turned a difficult shoreline into a harbor
Apollonia lies among calcareous aeolianite ridges and offshore islets. The natural anchorage had limitations, so early settlers worked the landscape rather than relying on it as they found it. The study describes quarrying and rock-cut construction that transformed parts of the coast into a more protected and usable port.
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Barriers, channels and working areas
Rock-cut barriers and surviving walls along Grotto Reef and the northern sides of Hammam and Sharkea Islands helped create a seaward protective screen. The researchers’ reconstruction proposes a northern breakwater, an early channel cut through a tombolo, and successive carving of Grotto Reef and Hammam Island. Quays and work spaces formed part of the larger harbor system.
The broad engineering sequence is placed by the study in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE, but the earliest layout is not settled in detail. The authors’ central interpretation is that the first generations of colonists recognized the natural anchorage’s limits and modified it. The harbor was subsequently rebuilt and adapted through successive periods.
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What about the 170,000-cubic-meter figure?
Some media coverage reports that Greeks removed roughly 170,000 cubic meters of stone. Daily Galaxy gives that figure, and Gizmodo repeats a similar estimate. The accessible text of the primary study describes quarrying and rock-cut architecture but does not state that volume, so it should be treated as a media-reported estimate rather than a verified measurement from the study. Daily Galaxy’s report and Gizmodo’s report use the figure in their coverage.
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The study’s explanation centers on tectonic movement, not a single dramatic event. Apollonia sits in a region crossed by normal faults, and motion along this fault network can create local areas of uplift as well as subsidence. The researchers conclude that these changes in the land drove major relative sea-level shifts at the site; they favor tectonic movement over glacial-isostatic effects as the main explanation.
Their best-fit reconstruction proposes a sequence of about 0.2 meters of uplift, followed by about 1.2 meters of uplift and then about 3.8 meters of subsidence. The net result is approximately 2.4 meters of displacement, consistent with the present depth of the slipways on Hammam Island. These are approximate reconstructed magnitudes, not direct measurements of one event or a uniform sinking of the entire harbor. The authors describe the estimates as imprecise and not fully consistent.
The paper is explicit about the limits of the evidence: “We do not attempt to ascribe a particular displacement to a particular recorded earthquake.” In other words, the study does not identify one known earthquake as the cause of the harbor’s submergence. Its account is a sequence of inferred tectonic movements, with the precise chronology and size of all events unresolved.
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What the evidence establishes—and what it does not
- Well supported: Apollonia was Cyrene’s harbor and naval base, and ancient builders substantially modified its naturally challenging coastline.
- The best-fit estimate: About 2.4 meters of net displacement at Hammam Island’s slipways, inferred from a qualified reconstruction.
- Not established: That every harbor structure lies eight feet underwater, that one earthquake sank the port, or that the reported 170,000-cubic-meter stone-removal figure is a verified result of the primary study.
- Still uncertain: The earliest exact harbor layout and the detailed timing and magnitude of every tectonic movement.
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