Post by Grand Moff Muffin on May 7, 2008 15:31:27 GMT
On Monday night I saw a 90-minute Time Team special about Doggerland, which blew me away.
Like most people here I've known for many years how all the continents of the Earth used to be one big land mass which broke apart into the continents we know today over hundreds of millions of years.
However, what I didn't appreciate was that as recently as 8000 years ago (very, very recently, compared with, say, the dinosaurs becoming extinct 65,000,000 years ago), there was dry land between England and Europe.
Nothing to do with plate tectonics and shifting continents - we've only lost Doggerland (an area the size of England) because of flooding due to climate change.
There are submerged forests of dead tree stumps, and remains of human settlements, all under the North Sea, between England and the Netherlands. Just ten thousand years ago you could walk from one to the other. Oil surveys have shown river channels, with networks of tributaries, on what were once plains now the bottom of the sea.
What's also fascinating is how North Sea fishermen also bring up animal remains from earlier periods - lions, elephants, rhinos, hippos, hyenas - they all once lived on the now flooded land under the North Sea.
Brilliant, eh?
Martin
Like most people here I've known for many years how all the continents of the Earth used to be one big land mass which broke apart into the continents we know today over hundreds of millions of years.
However, what I didn't appreciate was that as recently as 8000 years ago (very, very recently, compared with, say, the dinosaurs becoming extinct 65,000,000 years ago), there was dry land between England and Europe.
Nothing to do with plate tectonics and shifting continents - we've only lost Doggerland (an area the size of England) because of flooding due to climate change.
There are submerged forests of dead tree stumps, and remains of human settlements, all under the North Sea, between England and the Netherlands. Just ten thousand years ago you could walk from one to the other. Oil surveys have shown river channels, with networks of tributaries, on what were once plains now the bottom of the sea.
What's also fascinating is how North Sea fishermen also bring up animal remains from earlier periods - lions, elephants, rhinos, hippos, hyenas - they all once lived on the now flooded land under the North Sea.
Brilliant, eh?
Martin
