Conjuring the Lost Land Beneath the North Sea

New research reveals that Doggerland—a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland—was more than a simple thoroughfare. It was home.

by Tristan McConnell
December 5, 2024 | 4,400 words, about 22 minutes

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.



As ice melted and the sea level rose over centuries, Doggerland—between Britain and the European mainland—slowly disappeared beneath the North Sea. Illustration by Claus Lunau/Science Photo Library

More:
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/conjuring-the-lost-land-beneath-the-north-sea/