That is, until one summer day around the year 1,600 BC. They left behind remarkable paintings and pioneered technological advancements like indoor plumbing. From their capital on Crete, the Minoans’ influence reached Cyprus, across the Greek islands and into modern Turkey and the Palestinian coast. Thera Eruptionĭuring the mid-second millennium BC, one power dominated the Mediterranean. And there they would wait 8,000 years for the nets of fishermen to dredge up their remains. A 16 foot wall of water buried settlements and farms beneath the waves. The waves may have reached initial heights of 260 feet, striking the Norwegian coast with 130 foot breakers, and Scotland with waves 65 feet high.Īs for the people who lived in the low-lying fens of Doggerland, scientists believe this tsunami would have been catastrophic.
Meanwhile, on the surface, the ocean bent into a tsunami of unimaginable force. The rubble flow reached a speed of 90 mph underwater.Ī map showing the extent of Doggerland, along with the location of the Storegga slides. An estimated 770 cubic miles, or over 50 Mount Everests, of rock broke off and slid into the deep ocean. And one autumn day around 6225–6170 BCE, this cliff collapsed. The edge of the Norwegian continental shelf is an underwater cliff that runs for six hundred miles along the Atlantic Basin. But one event would turn the slow advance of the sea into an apocalyptic terror. The people of Doggerland must have watched with dread as their villages were swallowed up one by one. But by the end of the 7th millennium BC, a warming world caused sea levels to rise.
Today, fishermen routinely bring up carved bone and antler tools from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived here. Today, we call this submerged world Doggerland. Until about 8,000 years ago, the British Isles were a peninsula, joined to mainland Europe by a strip of chalk downs, swamps, lakes and wooded hills. Below are four of the most devastating natural events in recorded human history, and the societies that they wiped off the map. For ancient societies, without the means to predict natural disasters, destruction could often come suddenly and completely by surprise.
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