There Used To Be An Island Here

in 1931 a fishing trawler was working in the North Sea in an area known as dogger bank it's kind of an undersea raised formation it's about halfway between Britain and Denmark it's a popular spot for fishing because the water is shallower there and it's actually how it got its name a dogger is a type of Danish fishing boat anyway on this one particular fishing trip they were trawling a little bit too low and they wound up scraping up the sea floor and pulled some of that seafloor up onto their boat and as they were digging all that sea floor junk out of their Nets they realized that what they actually had what they had dug up underneath the sediment was peat now this is weird right away because peat is a nutrient dense organic soil that's made from like decomposing plant matter over thousands of years What suggests that there was once you know dense vegetation there but that's not what you would expect at the bottom of the ocean even weirder was that mixed in with that peat they found this a stone aged Barbed hunting spear made out of antler bone what was this doing in the middle of the ocean was it dropped off a stone age bowed did Stone Age boats even exist so to get some clarity on this they dug up a little bit more peat from that same area and they analyzed it and what they found was grains of pollen that suggested that the area was once a mixed Woodland in other words it used to be dry land dry land with people living on it yeah so what happened [Music] say the world used to be different as the most obvious statement ever made I mean of course continents have shifted and changed over time South America used to be spooned up against Africa and a giant Continental orgy we call Pangea ooh naughty geology hell fossils of sea creatures have been found right here in my backyard in north Texas because back in the Cretaceous there was an ocean here it was called the Western interior Seaway but these are things that take place over geologic time hundreds of thousands even millions of years the idea this could happen in the span of human history and fairly recent human history at that it's kind of mind-boggling and yet that's exactly what happened in this area of the North Sea that was once inhabited land an area we now call doggerland so what caused this to happen well the short answer is it's the same thing that killed the dinosaurs according to Batman and Robin what killed the dinosaurs the Ice Age terrible pun even worse science no the Ice Age didn't kill the dinosaurs but it did lower sea levels all around the world and this changed the map in a lot of ways in Australia it gave it this nice little Peninsula that merged with Papua New Guinea just Northwest of their Vietnam and Cambodia emerged with Indonesia and Brunei to create this giant land mass bigger than India Today speaking of India it once had a peninsula where the island of Sri Lanka is now Saudi Arabia was merged with Iran with no Persian Gulf in between them and perhaps most famously a land bridge formed over the Bering Strait connecting the eastern and western hemispheres allowing animals and humans to migrate into North America and in northern Europe the British Isles merged with the mainland forming this region that we're talking about today the reason for this drop in sea levels was of course the massive ice sheets that formed over the Northern Hemisphere during the late glacial maximum this was a period where just incomprehensibly large mile-high glaciers began creeping down from the Arctic starting about 33 000 years ago reaching their Peak around 25 000 years ago and finally retreating around 14 000 years ago it's thought that eight percent of their surface was covered in this thick ice and sea levels dropped 125 meters all because the average temperature dropped by six degrees Celsius now I've been calling this the late glacial maximum it's also sometimes called the last glacial maximum because this is not the only time it's happened it's actually happened a lot over the years from about 800 000 to 500 000 years ago there was the chromerian stage followed by the elster Ice Age about 450 to 300 000 years ago this was when neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis entered the scene leaving behind flint rocks and wooden Spears that have been found all over northern Europe including dockerland this was followed by the saline glaciation from 300 000 years ago to about 150 000 years ago then the Earth had a warming cycle called the eemian period that started about 120 000 years ago this caused ocean levels to rise by nine meters and put doggerland back under water this would actually happen several times it would be inhabited and then it would flood and then dry and inhabited it just over and over again the last of these glacial periods was the weishelian glaciation I think I'm saying that right anyway this began 115 000 years ago and it would last until about 12 000 years ago this was the period that encompassed the last glacial maximum talking about and this would bring it into the pleistocene age it was also when we Homo sapiens human beings came on the scene in northern Europe around 40 000 years ago the pleistocene actually kind of ended with a bit of a last hurray there was a warming period from about 14 690 to 12 890 years ago it's called the boiling al-arad interstateal and that was followed by the younger dryas which was a rapid cooling period between 12 900 and 11 700 years ago and this is when the temperatures leveled off into the Holocene period which is what we're living in today now that was a lot of history to cover in a very small amount of time so a ton got left out of that but it brings us to what you might call now the the golden years of doggerland before the glaciers truly melted away in the Seas rose again darker land was a kind of a lush Woodland populated by Mammoth bison reindeer and horses and some more surprising animals like lions and hyenas and this was like a Golden Corral all you can eat buffet for the humans in the area and just put this into perspective the Pyramids of Giza wouldn't be built for another 9 000 years Not only was hunting plentiful but fish thing was relatively easy and it boasts a slurry of tree species like Oak Hazel Birch Pine and Juniper and the people who logger landed this time today we know them as the Orangeburg civilization they were a hunter-gatherer group that emerged after the climate shifts kind of caused a change in ecosystems Orangeburg item has been found in Denmark Germany the Netherlands Belgium North France and Eastern England and it's thought that doggerland might have been especially popular during the winter during the migration of reindeer and they found similar Barb Spears like the ones they found on Docker bank and other Orangeburg settlements around Europe they were a group of nomadic tribes so they didn't like set up cities in doggerland or anything like that which is a good thing because as we already know dockerland's days were numbered as the glaciers continued to melt and the water slowly Rose much of daggerland became kind of marshy Wetlands which still makes for some pretty good hunting grounds for humans especially because it kept other Predators out like saber-toothed cats cats don't like to get wet even back then now the Duggar Bank area was higher in elevation so it's probably still a more dry and Woody but then around 9000 years ago an event took place on the other side of the world that pretty much sealed its fate over in North America as the laurentide ice sheet melted and receded northwards it left behind a massive Lake just to the northwest of our current Great Lakes called Lake Agassi Lake Agassi was insanely huge like it's bigger than all the Great Lakes combined it covered 440 000 square kilometers larger than any currently existing Lake today and similar in size of the Black Sea and all that water was being held back by Ice dams that eventually broke it's not completely clear which direction this water went some think it went up through the McKinsey Valley in Canada some through the St Lawrence River Valley some think it just dumped right into the Hudson Bay or maybe all three but when all this water spilled into the ocean it made its way around the world the ocean levels around the world Rose practically overnight and most of doggerland went under the water and dogger Bank became dagger Island some actually suggest that the lake Agassi event might be the source of all the flood myths from all around the ancient world because it did raise ocean levels everywhere and just like today people back then used to settle along coastlines it's likely a lot of settlements got wiped out including doggerland but this isn't why dogerland is sometimes called the Atlantis of the North Sea now at this point Duggar Island still remained along with a small land bridge connecting Britain to the mainland and dunker Island wasn't small it was 23 000 square kilometers roughly the size of Sardinia by the way fun fact this is the same area where they found the world's oldest boat a canoe was found that was dated to be around 7750 BCE so it is possible people could have even traveled to it now it was another event that has led some people to call it Atlantis around 6200 BCE so about 8 200 years ago the North Sea was hit with a series of massive tsunamis that was caused by the storyga slide this might sound like a dance you might do with a cousin's wedding but the storyga slide was an underwater landslide that occurred when a massive chunk of the continental shelf broke off it deplaced 3 500 cubic meters of debris that's 840 cubic miles that's basically like of an asteroid 9.5 miles wide dropped into the North Sea experts suggest that this may mega tsunami wiped out both the remaining land bridge and Dagger Island effectively wiping out any civilizations that might have remained there and separating Britain from Mainland Europe you might call it the first brexit now to the best of our knowledge any civilization that might have still been hanging around on Duggar Island were probably hunter-gatherers so the idea that an advanced and Powerful civilization got wiped out like in the Atlantis myth is probably a non-starter but it was an inhabited Island that literally sank into the ocean in a cataclysmic event now of course nothing in science is that cut and dried there is evidence that shows that this happened like the distribution of sand and clay in the area but other findings based off of sediment core suggest that it might have remained above water for several hundred years after the tsunami but investigations continue around doger Bank to learn more about what was lost all those years ago everything from Lions to woolly mammoths to dozens more Spirit tips and tools as of right now the youngest artifact found was from 6050 BCE now ironically plans are in the works to use dauger Bank to install an offshore Wind Farm including a floating artificial Island and the same place that a real Island used to be and kind of double ironically the whole point of a wind farm is to help reduce the very kind of sea level rise that Doom did in the first place it's a big project but there's an even bigger project that's being discussed that could actually bring Duggar Island back I mean it's unlikely but maybe because of rising sea levels and cities like Amsterdam being under threat there have been some proposals to put a dam across the entire North Sea in English Channel the plan is to extend a Dam from Scotland and the Shetland Islands across to Norway and from the southwest of England to the northwest of France this is being called the North European enclosure Dam and it would not just protect the North Sea but also the Baltic Sea and all the cities that lie on that Coast it would be a mega project to say the least the total length would be 657 kilometers and just for reference the longest bridge in the world is 165 kilometers estimates say that it could cost up to 500 billion dollars but it would protect their livelihoods and property of over 25 million people and probably prevent many times that cost and damages and I mean hey if they really want to get crazy about it maybe they could pump enough water out of it to bring dogger Island back and then discover all the secrets it holds again not likely but uh it's an interesting thought and I mean I think it'd be cool to you know learn more about the people who lived on dog or Island um you know it's easy to kind of just blow it off and say like ah they were Stone Age hunter gatherers but I mean keep in mind they were artists painting on Cave walls going back 30 000 years like one of the favorite things that I saw when I was in Ireland were the like Stone circles and monuments and tombs dating back 6 000 years these were mature civilizations with rituals and religions and understanding of astronomy they might not have been Atlantis but they were significant and also since they lived on islands that isolation probably created very distinct cultures that now have been completely lost to the Sea you know much like Ireland and Britain developed distinct cultures over thousands of years even though they were you know right next to each other and this Clash of cultures actually led to a catastrophe of its own that was threatening to wipe out Irish culture this one however was completely man-made the Irish Famine of the late 1840s was not the same as what happened on doggerland you know no tsunami was involved but but an argument could be made that it was the most devastating disaster that occurred in that area since dogger Islands walked away it was by far the biggest loss of life in that area I mean we have no way of knowing how many people were on dog or Island when it went down but it was undoubtedly less than the millions of people who literally starved to death between the years of 1846 and 1849 and it was entirely preventable which is why I made an entire video about it over on nebula for my forgotten atrocities Series in it we take a deep dive into the political turmoil between Britain and Ireland that set the stage for the famine the potato blight that wiped out crops throughout Ireland and all over Europe for that matter and the horrific starvation conditions that occurred because of it it's definitely something that would need to be watered down for YouTube to be okay with it but this is on nebulous so yeah it's dry as a bone that doesn't sound right it's salacious salacious is a bone it's riveting anyway it's riveting content that you can only find on nebula nebula is a streaming platform that I'm a part of along with many of your favorite smart YouTubers we can see all of our videos early and AD free so for example this video on nebula doesn't have the silly ad read in it it's also the home of nebula Originals like my forgotten atrocities series that I just mentioned also my mystery is the human body series and there's also nebula 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Brian thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos and just become part of a really awesome Community just go to patreon.com answers with Joe please do like and share this video if you liked it now this is your first time here um you might want to check this video out because Google thinks you'll find that interesting or find any of the others if you're watching on your browser that have my little face in the thumbnails and if you enjoy them I do invite you to subscribe I come back of videos every Monday by the way real quick before I close if you're really into the doggerland thing and you want to learn more about it there's an Instagram page for people who are researching doggerland I'll put a link to it down in the description anyway thanks again for watching now go out there have an eye-opening rest of the week stay safe and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,098,730

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: xCCcr8_LdaM

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022