Tuesday, 2 April 2024

The Return of Doggerland?

 “We estimate raising Dogger Bank would cost £97.5bn, but would bring present value benefits of £622bn. Under the government’s standard method of cost-benefit analysis, this project would get a go-ahead, with a cost-benefit ratio of 6.2.”

https://modelthinking.substack.com/p/a-new-atlantis

For reference: Doggerland @ Wikipedia

“this story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France to England.”

In 1897 H.G. Wells set his book “A Story of the Stone Age”,

Humans, hunter-gathering Neanderthals, lived in Doggerland 10,000BC – 7,500BC.

Geological surveys have suggested Doggerland stretched from what is now the east coast of Great Britain to what are now the Netherlands, the western coast of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland.[2] It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic period.

The archaeological potential of the area was first identified in the early 20th century, and interest intensified in 1931 when a fishing trawler operating east of the Wash dragged up a barbed antler point that was subsequently dated to a time when the area was tundra.

UK Archeaologists from Europes Lost Frontiers project are using seabed mapping (originally created by oil and gas companies) to create 3D renderings of 17,000 square miles of Doggerland. Including rivers, lakes systems.  Extracting core samples via survey ships to hopefully capture DNA from the plants and animals that lived there – including wooly rhinoceroses in addition to the wooly mammoths and hunter-gathering Neanderthals.

Vessels have since dragged up remains of mammoths, lions and other animals, and a few prehistoric tools and spearpoints, arrowheads, 

Evidence gathered allows study of past environments, ecological change, and human transition from hunter-gatherer to farming communities

It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6500–6200 BCE.

What caused the sea level to rise 180feet? (6 feet every 100 years for 3,000yrs)

The three Storegga Slides are amongst the largest known submarine landslides.

They occurred at the edge of Norway’s continental shelf in the Norwegian Sea, approximately 6225–6170 BCE.

The collapse involved an estimated 180 mi length of coastal shelf, with a total volume of 840 cu mi of debris, which caused a tsunami in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The flooding immediately turned Doggerland into an island, then, eventually the sea swallowed the island.