Doggerland, the territory engulfed 8,000 years ago under the North Sea

Doggerland, the territory engulfed 8,000 years ago under the North Sea

The document I chose is an article from the newspaper “L’Obs”. This article was written on 2nd August by Jean-Paul Fritz. And it’s about Doggerland, a part of Great Britain who was engulfed under the sea 8,000 years ago.

To begin, we can quickly summarize the Earth situation 18,000 years before. At that time the Thames was about to throw itself into the Rhine, then follow the course of the middle of the current Channel, and throw itself into the Atlantic. You need to imagine England attached to the European continent, there were no British Isles, no need for a boat to go from Calais to Dover, it was enough to cross on foot! Since then, the world has suffered a global warming, slow and natural. The ice melted, the waters began to rise. From the gigantic strip of land that connected England to Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is only one sandbank left, Dogger Bank. These shoals represent an area of ​​17,600 square kilometers (twice Corsica), submerged between 15 and 36 meters deep. Formerly, it was hills. Around, there were forests, swamps, plains. And humains have lived there.

But this didn’t stop here, we discovered proofs of them existence. Off the south coast of Sweden, archaeologists from Lund University have discovered a seasonal fishing camp. Located on the edge of what was then a lagoon, in a landscape of pine forests, it is now about twenty meters under water, and artefacts have been found up to three kilometers from the coast. Everything indicated fishing when these humans were there, 9,000 years ago.

However, the Doggerland, is far from having delivered even a small part of its secrets. This is precisely why the University of Bradford, led by Pr. Vincent Gaffney (archaeologist), is interested. The project “Europe’s lost frontiers” is also financed by the European Research Council and it must continue until 2020. Mixing archeology and new technologies, these scientists detection instruments to model the seabed corresponding to the prehistoric engulfed lands. They were at a modeled area of ​​45,000 km2, which is greater than that of Switzerland.

I chose this document because he literally shows us the “first version” of Brexit. And thanks to this discover we perhaps will have some clue on the way to treat with ice melting and rises of oceans. Indeed, specific civilizations are going to disappear in this context of global warming like civilizations in the Pacific (Kiribati Islands).

But it will be problematic in the future, we can easily imagine important migratory flows that will just move the problem but not solve it.

[pic 1][pic 2]

[pic 3]

[pic 4]

[pic 5]

[pic 6]

...