From Hakai Magazine, December 5:
New research reveals that Doggerland—a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland—was more than a simple thoroughfare. It was home.
The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over the centuries, transforming the North Sea into an industrialized seascape.
Trade has made this sea—which washes against the United Kingdom to the west and mainland Europe to the east—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Some 1,300 passenger ferries, cargo vessels, and tankers cross the English Channel at the sea’s narrowest point every week. Commercial trawlers harvesting cod, herring, haddock, and more have scoured the seabed, causing some fish populations to decline. The fossil fuel industry has sucked 45 billion barrels of oil and gas from the bedrock beneath the United Kingdom’s territorial waters alone over the past half-century, leaving the rusting remnants of abandoned oil rigs rearing from the sea’s turbulent surface. Above the waves, the North Sea hums with dozens of wind farms, with many more to come, each one comprising hundreds of towering turbines to generate electricity and replace dwindling reserves of fossil fuels. And all this human exploitation has polluted the sea with undesirable chemicals, trash, and noise.
Once upon a time—before industrialization—the sea was filled with life. But go back further still, and the land beneath the sea itself was a vibrant ecosystem for all manner of terrestrial beings.
Evidence of the earliest human use of the North Sea region lies deep beneath the water, suspended silt, and seafloor, in the submerged territory of Doggerland that once connected the United Kingdom and mainland Europe. Before Doggerland was lost beneath rising seas, its low hills and broad valleys, braided rivers and wide estuaries, marshy wetlands and long gravel beaches were home to bear, boar, red deer, and people.
Doggerland is not well known outside the field of archaeology. And historically, when archaeologists have discussed it, they considered it a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago. But innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia—a place that was known, that was home to generations—until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten. As climate change accelerates in the modern era, the story of Doggerland becomes a story of our future.
Vincent Gaffney, a jovial and unpretentious 66-year-old landscape archaeologist with close-cropped white hair and thick dark-rimmed spectacles, has spent two decades conjuring this lost land from the murky depths. Unlike most archaeologists, Gaffney has conducted his explorations without ever setting foot on his study site, which lies roughly 20 to 30 meters below the sea’s surface. Instead, his pioneering work at the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, which he founded at the University of Bradford in England, involves sifting through huge quantities of seismic survey data. The detailed 3D maps and simulations he derives from that data re-create the topography and ecological complexity of an area nearly the size of Washington State. His work disputes the dismissive assumption that Doggerland was simply an ancient thoroughfare by bringing into relief a place that was ideal for human habitation, with all the water, food, and other resources people would have needed to thrive. “Everyone called it a land bridge, something you come across or go back again,” he says. “But you don’t live on bridges.”
Gaffney was born to working-class parents in England’s northeast and, despite spending a lifetime in the rarefied world of academia, retains his gentle Geordie burr and a love of English ale. For half his career, he has been beguiled by Doggerland, the idea of a lost landscape, of an Atlantis beneath the North Sea. But Doggerland is not Atlantis; it is not even that unusual.
The world has many submerged ancient coastal shelves such as Doggerland: Beringia extends between North America and Russia; Sundaland underpins Southeast Asia; the Sahul Shelf juts out from Australia. “Coasts hold the key to the mobility of humans across the millennia,” Gaffney tells me over a pint and a pie at his favorite pub. Cumulatively, submerged coastal shelves take up about the same space as present-day North America and would have been fundamental territories for human occupation and migration. Yet they have been largely out of reach of archaeologists. “These are all massively important historical areas which you cannot understand unless you know what’s happening underneath the sea,” Gaffney says.
What makes Doggerland different from Earth’s many other submerged lands is that Gaffney has found a way to see it....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
Doggerland is believed to have been mostly uninhabitable during the last Ice Age, but as the ice melted, plant and animal activity started to emerge on the land – and eventually humans appeared there during the Mesolithic period. No border issues between Britain and Europe existed back then.
As the ice melted, sea levels were rising too, causing the land’s eventual submergence even before the catastrophic Storegga Slide. By 9,000 BC, Britain could have already been separated from the continent, but some landmass probably still existed....
Previously on underwater landslides:
Re/Insurance: "Pandemic could inflate hurricane industry losses by up to 20%..."
Of course the jackpot for risk modelers is to have a volcano go off triggering an earthquake leading to the collapse of an underwater seamount, causing a tsunami as a hurricane roars through a pandemic zone.
Most likely location for this unlikely occasion: the Lesser Antilles.
Unlike Fukushima, no nukes though.
So it would be hard to recreate the typhoon approaching the nuke plant devastated by tsunami caused by the earthquake* but, but volcano and pandemic!
I believe for the remainder of 2020 our motto should be "Hey, it could be worse!""
These 4 Ancient Apocalypses Changed the Course of Civilization
And, without making too big a fuss about it, as we saw in a 2014 post, sometimes people do live on bridges:
A View of 17th Century London & London Bridge from Southwark
If interested see also:
Life across the water: exploring London Bridge and its houses
