Brexit has happened before – around 7,500 years ago, when Britain was severed from mainland Europe by rising sea levels. That separation from Europe also happened at a time of higher temperatures, melting glaciers and rising sea levels. And even though climate change then was entirely natural, driven by the Earth’s orbit around the sun, it still carries a warning in the changing climate of the 21st century.
At the end of the last ice age, Britain was a peninsula of northwest Europe, connected by a vast plain called Doggerland. This fertile land was larger than the current UK, covered in rivers and lakes, with plenty of fish, birds and other animals and a place where stone age people thrived.
But as the huge ice sheets thawed, sea levels rose and flooded Doggerland until it eventually vanished.
Today Doggerland is our Atlantis, a drowned landscape under the North Sea only visible from seismic surveys of the seabed and occasional finds of ancient tree stumps, the remains of ancient animals, stone age tools and human bones.
This story is more than just a mere curiosity, though. The people of Doggerland must have suffered as their land vanished, especially during occasional catastrophic floods. But the survivors would have adapted and moved to dry land.
Today’s climate warming is entirely unnatural, from manmade pollution, but sea level rises over the next century are expected at a similar rate to those that sank Doggerland. One big difference, though, is that today’s populations are vastly larger and nothing like as mobile as the stone age people, and so it’s very uncertain how we will adapt to the encroaching sea.
