Climate Change and the Lost World of Doggerland
What the study of past climate catastrophes can teach us about the future
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From 10,000 to around 8,000 years ago, a landmass called Doggerland, stretching over most of what is today the North Sea, gradually sank beneath the waves. Estimates tell us that the rate of its sinking averaged 3–6 feet every 100 years.
For comparison, in the next century, models are all over the place, of course, but one says we’re looking at 2 feet in the next 100 years, and another says we’re looking at more like 2 ½ feet.
The inhabitants of Doggerland — of which we know very little, other than that they at first included a population of Neanderthals which later disappear from the record and that the modern human population seem to have practiced your typical prehistoric hunter-gatherer lifestyle — are thought to have migrated elsewhere in several waves before the landmass was entirely submerged. The exact timeline by which Doggerland sank is of course unknown, but it is suspected that a gigantic tsunami caused by an underwater landslide in the north sea around 6200 BC now dubbed the Second Storegga Slide might have wiped its last vestiges out. A 2021 study found evidence of water encroachment in Scotland from this event inland as far as 18 miles; we can only imagine what might have become of what people remained on Doggerland on that fateful day.
There were admittedly an unusually large number of such tsunamis at the end of the last Ice Age, when glacial melt dramatically altered coasts across the world. Still, at a time when the rest of the world’s glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates and climatic instability is at an all-time historical high, we shouldn’t scoff at the prospect what a similar catastrophe could do today.
And we, obviously, and most importantly, are not hunter-gatherers, which means we’re going to have an infinitely harder time than the people of Doggerland adjusting to the new world which we’re all about to enter. It sounds pessimistic to say that our only options are to either invest billions into climate-resistant infrastructure mega-projects or move the hell away from the coast, and perhaps it is, but I still think it’s the most reasonable assumption to make at this point. People are going…
