Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Doggerland a.k.a. Holland Writ Very Large

Strange Maps has a particularly interesting map today, which shows plans to drain the North Sea:

The post continues:

Word of the day: epeiric. That term describes shallow, salty seas covering part of a continental shelf. Examples include the Sundance, Zechstein and Turgai Seas – all excellently named, but alas all dried up. Epeiric seas still around today include the Hudson Bay and the Persian Gulf. And the North Sea, of which we shall now speak.

Some 10 millennia ago, during the last Ice Age, so much water was stored in huge polar ice caps that sea levels were 120 m lower than today. The North Sea consequently wasn’t a sea, but a land bridge between Britain and Europe. Geologists call this Doggerland, after the Dogger Bank, the shallowest, largest sand bank in the North Sea today. In all probability, this now sunken land land of once undulating prairie was quite densely inhabited by our Stone Age forebears. These must have been their hunting grounds, their prey the mammoths whose bones fishermen sometimes still dredge up from the sea floor.

In the 1930s, there existed at least one wild plan to reclaim this particular piece of sunken real estate from the seas, if maybe only in the pages of the editors of Modern Mechanix, an American magazine (1928-2001) that ran under a variety of titles (the best-known perhaps being Mechanix Illustrated). This map, dated to September 1930, has a slightly unbelievable air to it, and its inspiration probably isn’t Doggerland, but might well be the better-argumented Atlantropa scheme (discussed in #287 of this blog).

As the post goes on to explain, the plan was--and likely remains--infeasible.

The post did bring a “what if” counterfactual to mind, however. Suppose Doggerland had never sunk back below the waves or, I guess more precisely, suppose the waves had never risen back above Doggerland. How would history have changed?

Clearly, I would not be writing this post in English. With no English Channel to protect it, Britain never would have arisen--let alone survived--as an independent culture. Instead, it would have been a province of whatever continental power dominated at the relevant time periods.Unlike France and Spain, for example, Britain would have had no natural barriers between it and a potential conquerer.