Twenty thousand years ago you could walk from Norfolk to Denmark. The plain in between — now called Doggerland — had rivers, lakes and people. Then the ice melted, and the sea took it back, one coastline at a time.
Land c.10,000 yrs ago (c.8000 BCE)Dogger island, last refugeLand todayAncient rivers (traced in seismic data)
120 m
How much lower the sea stood at the height of the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago. Most of the southern North Sea was dry ground.
Univ. of Sussex · Doggerland literature
c.6500 BCE
Britain is cut off from the continent; the land bridge is gone.
17,600 km²
Dogger Bank today, the last high ground of Doggerland. It now sits 15–36 m underwater.
01 · Sea level
The water came back by about 120 metres
As the ice sheets melted, sea level rose in surges. During one, Meltwater Pulse 1A about 14,500 years ago, the sea rose roughly 4 m per century.
02 · Timeline
A drowning in slow motion
Doggerland flooded between about 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. Its people would have seen the coast move within their own lifetimes.
20k Last Glacial Maximum: sea ~120 m lower
14.5k Meltwater Pulse 1A
10k Lagoons, marsh, forest
8.3k Cut off; Storegga tsunami
7k Dogger island to ≥c.5000 BCE
now Wind farms
20,000 yrs ago · sea level −120 mtoday · 0 m
03 · Scale
How big is a lost country?
Seismic surveys have mapped about 23,000 km² of buried Doggerland. That is more than half the size of the Netherlands, and it is only part of what flooded.
Storegga slide footprint
80,000 km²
The Netherlands (total area)
41,850 km²
Doggerland mapped by seismic
23,000 km²
Dogger Bank today
17,600 km²
04 · Storegga
The wave from Norway
About 8,150 years ago, a huge underwater landslide off Norway sent three waves across the North Sea. They reached a landscape that was already going under.
~8,150
years ago the seabed off Norway failed
Univ. of Bradford / Geosciences 2020
3,200 km³
of sediment slid down the slope
Geosciences 2020
80,000 km²
of seafloor moved — about the size of Scotland
Geosciences 2020
up to ~20 m
tsunami run-up recorded in Shetland deposits
Hill et al.
05 · Evidence
Found in the nets
Most of what we know about Doggerland came up by accident, in fishing nets and dredgers, or turned up in oil-company seismic data.
1931
The trawler Colinda nets a 220 mm barbed antler point in peat, 40 km off Norfolk, near the Ower Bank.
32 m
A flint hammerstone is recovered 40 km off Cromer, from 32 m of water (BBC, 2019).
40,000+
years old: a Neanderthal skull fragment dredged from the Middeldiep, 16 km off Zeeland.
23,000 km²
of buried landscape mapped from oil-industry seismic data, including the Shotton River, almost Rhine-sized.
06 · Why it matters
What to notice on the map
The hatched ochre plain joins East Anglia to the Netherlands and Denmark. It shows the coast around 8000 BCE, when the North Sea was half its size.
The dark island on Dogger Bank stayed above water until at least about 5000 BCE, long after the land bridge was gone.
The blue lines are rivers and a lake basin, the Shotton River, the Elbe valley and Outer Silver Pit, traced in seismic data under today's seabed.
The arrow points toward Storegga, about 500 km off the top of the map, where the tsunami started.
Doggerland is the best-studied case of what happens when the coast moves faster than people can adjust. The peak rates after the Ice Age were much faster than today's, but today's rate is speeding up, and far more people live on low coasts now.
~4 m
per century during Meltwater Pulse 1A (Liu et al. 2016)
4.7 mm
per year globally, 2015–2024, about 0.47 m per century and rising (WMO 2025)
Today, Doggerland's last hilltop is going back to work: offshore wind farms planned on Dogger Bank add up to more than 9 GW.