An ambitious expedition is about to start, with a mission to map the undersea area known as Doggerland, and in particular to take samples to see if any trace of human habitation can be found.
I’ve written about Doggerland before. It’s a large landmass that used to connect the British Isles to the mainland of Europe during the most recent Ice Age’s low sea levels, and it was submerged when the ice melted as the Ice Age ended. Speculation is that the area was settled, and that the humans there left evidence of their habitation that might be discovered, although it’s a longshot:
Using seabed mapping data the team plans to produce a 3D chart revealing the rivers, lakes, hills and coastlines of the country. Specialist survey ships will take core sediment samples from selected areas to extract millions of fragments of DNA from the buried plants and animals.
Prof Vincent Gaffney, from the University of Bradford’s school of archaeological and forensic sciences, said: “If this is successful it will be the first time anybody will have produced such evidence for settlements in the deep waters of the North Sea. This will be a real first. That would be new knowledge of what is really a lost continent.”
Theories abound as to what has caused the periodic ice ages of earth’s past, but it certainly wasn’t humankind’s carbon footprint. One wonders about whether ubiquitous flooding legends are connected to some of this melting and subsequent flooding. And when I say “ubiquitous,” I mean it:
The flood myth motif is found among many cultures as seen in the Mesopotamian flood stories, Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek mythology, the Genesis flood narrative, Pralaya in Hinduism, the Gun-Yu in Chinese mythology, Bergelmir in Norse mythology, in the lore of the K’iche’ and Maya peoples in Mesoamerica, the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa tribe of Native Americans in North America, the Muisca, and Cañari Confederation, in South America, Africa, and the Aboriginal tribes in southern Australia.
That Wiki entry I just linked goes into quite a bit of detail about theories about the origins of these myths. Suffice to say that theories vary. The flooding that submerged Doggerland didn’t all happen in a day, or even forty days, but it seems to have been a result of both gradual and sudden processes [emphasis mine]:
As ice melted at the end of the last glacial period of the current ice age, sea levels rose and the land began to tilt in an isostatic adjustment as the huge weight of ice lessened. Doggerland eventually became submerged, cutting off what was previously the British peninsula from the European mainland by around 6500 BC. The Dogger Bank, an upland area of Doggerland, remained an island until at least 5000 BC. Key stages are now believed to have included the gradual evolution of a large tidal bay between eastern England and Dogger Bank by 9000 BC and a rapid sea-level rise thereafter, leading to Dogger Bank becoming an island and Great Britain becoming physically disconnected from the continent.
A recent hypothesis postulates that much of the remaining coastal land was flooded by a megatsunami around 6200 BC, caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway known as the Storegga Slide. This suggests: “that the Storegga Slide tsunami would have had a catastrophic impact on the contemporary coastal Mesolithic population…. Britain finally became separated from the continent and in cultural terms, the Mesolithic there goes its own way.” A study published in 2014 suggested that the only remaining parts of Doggerland at the time of the Storegga Slide were low-lying islands, but supported the view that the area had been abandoned at about the same time as the tsunamis.
Another view speculates that the Storegga tsunami devastated Doggerland but then ebbed back into the sea, and that later Lake Agassiz (in North America) burst releasing so much fresh water that sea levels over about two years rose to flood much of Doggerland and make Britain an island.
All of this without apparent human intervention. It drives home the point that, whatever is happening now with global warming and climate change, enormous such events have periodically occurred in the past through some sort of natural non-anthropogenic process.
As for Lake Agassiz, here you go [emphasis mine]:
Around 13,000 years ago, [a lake formed from glacial melt] came to cover much of what are now Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. At its greatest extent, it may have covered as much as 440,000 km2 (170,000 sq mi), larger than any currently existing lake in the world (including the Caspian Sea) and approximately the area of the Black Sea…
The ice returned to the south for a time, but as it again retreated north of the present Canada–United States border around 10,000 years ago, Lake Agassiz refilled. The last major shift in drainage occurred around 8,200 years ago. The melting of remaining Hudson Bay ice caused Lake Agassiz to drain nearly completely. This final drainage of Lake Agassiz has been associated with an estimated 0.8 to 2.8 m (2.6 to 9.2 ft) rise in global sea levels.
Lake Agassiz’s major drainage reorganization events were of such magnitudes that they had significant impact on climate, sea level and possibly early human civilization. The lake’s enormous freshwater release into the Arctic Ocean has been postulated to have disrupted oceanic circulation and caused temporary cooling. The draining of 13,000 years ago may be the cause of the Younger Dryas stadial. Although disputed, the draining at 9,900–10,000 years ago may be the cause of the 8,200 yr climate event. A recent study by Turney and Brown links the 8,500-years ago drainage to the expansion of agriculture from east to west across Europe; they suggest that this may also account for various flood myths of prehistoric cultures, including the Biblical flood narrative.
What’s especially interesting is that the changes in a lake in the middle of North America would have such an effect on sea levels. That, in turn, has affected human history—and yet how many of us ever learned about Lake Agassiz in our history classes (or even our science classes, if we didn’t take geology)? Not me. How about you?
