Doggerland drowns
Rising seas swallow the plain joining Britain to Europe, and a tsunami finishes it.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 500 years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Meltwater from the collapsing ice sheets raises sea level steadily through the early Holocene, progressively flooding the low country beneath what is now the North Sea. By around 6500 BCE Britain is close to being cut off, and the remaining islands are largely finished by the Storegga tsunami. An entire Mesolithic landscape — with its rivers, camps and cemeteries — is now seabed, known mainly from what trawlers drag up.