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+--- Thread: How a giant tsunami devastated Britain’s "Atlantis" (/thread-8830.html)
How a giant tsunami devastated Britain’s "Atlantis" - C C - Jul 16, 2020
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/tsunami-britain-atlantis-6200-bc-archaeology-a9622591.html
EXCERPTS: . . . The catastrophe unfolded in about 6200BC, when Britain’s population was made up of thousands of very small hunter-gatherer communities – perhaps a total of around 50,000 people, concentrated predominantly in coastal areas, especially river estuaries and floodplains along the east coast. [...] the new research suggests that two-thirds of the land inundated by the tsunami was in that newly investigated southern area of submerged territory, sometimes popularly dubbed Britain’s North Sea Atlantis (Doggerland).
[...] Most people were at least partly dependent on marine resources, so they tended to live in small temporary or semi-permanent encampments and settlements relatively close to the sea. That made them particularly vulnerable to the disaster. It’s possible that, in total, up to 12,000 prehistoric Britons lost their lives. The tsunami was caused by a huge underwater landslide which occurred off the west coast of Norway. Scientists believe that three factors combined to trigger the slide. [...] It is estimated that about 767 cubic miles of continental shelf collapsed in just a few hours, causing the tsunami.
[...] In Britain, many east coast estuaries and river valleys were inundated. ... The key estuaries and river valleys affected would have included the Moray Firth, the lower Spey Valley, the Firth of Tay and the Tay Valley, the Firth of Forth and the Forth Valley, the Tees Valley, the Humber estuary area, the Wash and three valleys in land which is now covered by the southwestern North Sea.
“The multidisciplinary investigation we carried out reveals that the tsunami wasn’t just a single wave – but impacted the now submerged southern North Sea area we examined in three successive inundations, probably spread over just a few hours at most,” said geophysicist Dr Richard Bates, of the University of St Andrews. In some parts of Britain the tsunami penetrated far inland. Geomorphological evidence shows that it surged inland along Scotland’s Forth river for some 20 miles.
It is thought that it probably took hundreds of years for Britain’s population to recover. The waves may also have temporarily and very severely disrupted coastal food resources – especially the shellfish on which a substantial part of the population depended. As a result, it is conceivable that competition for surviving resources temporarily increased and resulted in low-level warfare. Certainly evidence from the tsunami-affected west coast of Denmark for that period suggests that such interpersonal violence increased.
The 6200 BC tsunami event, known as the Storegga Slide, is of particular interest to scientists because of the possibility it may happen again. [...] The multidisciplinary team’s investigation into the tsunami’s impact on now long-submerged land in the southern North Sea is published this week in the international scientific journal, Geosciences. (MORE - details)