Posted on 04/23/2007 2:29:02 PM PDT by blam
Lost world warning from North Sea
By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education
How a homestead might have looked in the flooded area
Archaeologists are uncovering a huge prehistoric "lost country" hidden below the North Sea. This lost landscape, where hunter gatherer communities once lived, was swallowed by rising water levels at the end of the last ice age.
University of Birmingham researchers are heralding "stunning" findings as they map the "best-preserved prehistoric landscape in Europe".
This large plain had disappeared below the water more than 8,000 years ago.
Scientists at the University of Birmingham have been using oil exploration technology to build a map of the once-inhabited area that now lies below the North Sea - stretching from the east coast of Britain up to the Shetland Islands and across to Scandinavia.
'Terrifying'
"It's like finding another country," says Professor Vince Gaffney, chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics.
Prehistoric rivers, hills and valleys are mapped off the east coast
It also serves as a warning for the scale of impact that climate change can cause, says Professor Gaffney.
Human communities would have lost their homelands as the rising water began to encroach upon the wide, low-lying plains.
"At times this change would have been insidious and slow - but at times it could have been terrifyingly fast. It would have been very traumatic for these people," he says.
"It would be a mistake to think that these people were unsophisticated or without culture... they would have had names for the rivers and hills and spiritual associations - it would have been a catastrophic loss," says Professor Gaffney.
As the temperature rose and glaciers retreated and water levels rose, the inhabitants would have been pushed off their hunting grounds and forced towards higher land - including to what is now modern-day Britain.
The rising water levels began to remake the coastline
"In 10,000 BC hunter gatherers were living on the land in the middle of the North Sea. By 6,000 BC, Britain was an island. The area we have mapped was wiped out in the space of 4,000 years," says Professor Gaffney.
So far the team has examined a 23,000 square kilometre area of the sea bed - mapping out coastlines, rivers, hills, sandbanks and salt marshes as they would have appeared about 12,000 years ago.
And once the physical features have been established, Professor Gaffney says it will be possible to narrow the search for sites that could yield more evidence of how these prehistoric people lived.
These inhabitants would have lived in family groups in huts and hunted animals such as deer.
The mapping of this landscape could also raise questions about its preservation, says Professor Gaffney - and how it can be protected from activities such as pipe-laying and the building of wind farms.
Yes.
Would the picture shown really represent the landscape at the end of an ice age?
I would expect snow and ice, which would then melt, thus flooding the landscape.
Am I missing somthing?
And I'll bet one of the names, as it's come down through history to us, was Atlantis.
The professor is obviously a 'global warming' alarmist and it's really frightening to me to find a person of his academic rank who's so totally ignorant of normal, natural geological and climatological processes. Climate changes constantly, Professor Dipwad! So does terrain as it's sculpted by water and wind erosion, gouged by glaciers and shifted around by tectonics/earthquakes. Humanity's only been on Earth for a quick blink of the Cosmic Eye.
And one could speculate ...
that the reason this huge flat plain existed
was because yet another 10,000 years earlier,
under different climatic conditions,
it was at the bottom of the sea ...
“...protected from pipe laying and wind farms” AND drilling for oil? My husband invented the device that permitted oil recovery from the North Sea and has brought millions of $$$ of income to the British Isles. You know, none of those folks (from 8000 years ago) are alive now and I think that it is safe to drill for the much needed oil!
Archeology is a fascinating topic, but please don’t let the greens take it over.
Very good addition, thanks.
Nope. It had been above water for at least 120,000 years prior...probably longer.
LOL. Nicely done.
Probably. The floor of the North Sea is primarily composed of sedimentary rock consisting of soil ejected into the sea by the many rivers that feed into it. The whole thing is essentially one massive underwater delta where the waters of some of Europes biggest rivers drain. Over millions of years, the sediment created a fairly flat plain. When the water receded, it was exposed.
That’s also why there’s so much oil there. Millions of years worth of plant material has been washed into the sea by those same rivers.
You’re talking about the duration of the ice age itself. The plain was exposed during most or all of the ice age, but it was probably inundated during the preceding interglacial as well. There’s no geologic evidence to indicate any massive uplifting in the area over the past million years or so, making it a fairly safe assumption that the North Sea plain has been at or near its current elevation since the Alpine uplift began tens of millions of years ago. I’ll admit that I haven’t studied that region specifically, but from what I understand it hasn’t been above water permanently for millions of years.
Attention all "global warming" nutburgers!
It's happened before.
It will happen again.
Settled? Of course the issue is settled.
Anthropogenic global warming is the new religion of the truly ignorant and dense. No remedy for that. No amount of money can cure stupidity.
The people down in New Orleans are still struggling with the concept.
I'm wondering if they used rotary bits on their drill strings to find that oil.
Not as much difference as I would have supposed.
Some people probably had to drive their SUV’s to get to drier land as the water level rose.
However, there are those who (for a fee) will gladly usher and collect the offerings..., hmmmhhh, make that TAXES!
And just how many artifacts have been uncovered, and classified proving that the area was once inhabited by hunter gatherers, or any body for that matter? Zero, Zilch, Nada. More manufactured junk science trying to prove were all doomed without big intrusive government.
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