Prehistoric North Sea 'Atlantis' hit by 5m tsunamiBy Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website
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Dig finds '10,000-year-old home'
North Sea 'Atlantis' uncovered
The moment Britain became an island
A prehistoric "Atlantis" in the North Sea may have been abandoned after being hit by a 5m tsunami 8,200 years ago.
The wave was generated by a catastrophic subsea landslide off the coast of Norway.
Analysis suggests the tsunami over-ran Doggerland, a low-lying landmass that has since vanished beneath the waves.
"It was abandoned by Mesolithic tribes about 8,000 years ago, which is when the Storegga slide happened," said Dr Jon Hill from Imperial College London.
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The impact... would have been massive - comparable to the Japanese tsunami of 2011”
Dr Jon Hill Imperial College London
The wave could have wiped out the last people to occupy this island.
The research has been submitted to the journal Ocean Modelling and is being presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna this week.
Dr Hill and his Imperial-based colleagues Gareth Collins, Alexandros Avdis, Stephan Kramer and Matthew Piggott used computer simulations to explore the likely effects of the Norwegian landslide.
He told BBC News: "We were the first ever group to model the Storegga tsunami with Doggerland in place. Previous studies have used the modern bathymetry (ocean depth)."
As such, the study gives the most detailed insight yet into the likely impacts of the huge landslip and its associated tsunami wave on this lost landmass.
This animation shows the evolution of the wave - the red shows the height and the blue colour the depth of variation in the sea surface
During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower; at its maximum extent Doggerland connected Britain to mainland Europe.
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I think they are probably right, because the tsunami would have been a catastrophic event”
Prof Vince Gaffney University of Birmingham
It was possible for human hunters to walk from what is now northern Germany across to East Anglia.
But from 20,000 years ago, sea levels began to rise, gradually flooding the vast landscape.
By around 10,000 years ago, the area would still have been one of the richest areas for hunting, fishing and fowling (bird catching) in Europe.
A large freshwater basin occupied the centre of Doggerland, fed by the River Thames from the west and by the Rhine in the east. Its lagoons, marshes and mudflats would have been a haven for wildlife.
"In Mesolithic times, this was paradise," explained Bernhard Weninger, from the University of Cologne in Germany, who was not involved with the present study.
But 2,000 years later, Doggerland had become a low-lying, marshy island covering an area about the size of Wales.