Ice Age & The English Channel –How Britain became the "Blessed Isle"
It was once the center of one of the world’s most powerful monarchy’s, but is now home to the greatest source of royal gossip the world has to offer. Nevertheless, the British Isles have long been the center of a geographical debate that has failed to be settled. That is, until now; possibly.
In an article in the most recent edition of the journal Nature, scientists from the Imperial College London have concluded that the channel separating England from mainland Europe was formed by a sudden and catastrophic flood that likely occurred 450,000 to 200,000 years ago when the Rhine and Thames rivers fed a large lake in the area now known as the southern North Sea and may have lasted several months.
It has been known that there is a common marker within the White Cliffs of Dover that matches with deposits in France, thus linking the two together somehow. However it has been a mystery exactly what caused the distancing.
The study, which centers around the most detailed map of the channel
floor ever made, dispels previous theories such as glacial carving and
tidal forces as being the cause. The scientists involved in the
discovery, Sanjeev Gupta, Jenny S. Collier, Andy Palmer-Felgate &
Graeme Potter, believe that it was two catastrophic floods that created
the English Channel.
The area to the north of the channel basin was a lake that formed in the area now known as the southern North Sea. The rivers Rhine and Thames fed the massive lake, and it was blocked off by glaciers to the north and the Weald-Artois chalk ridge which spanned the Dover Straits. When the water levels within the lake rose to such a level that they would have overflowed, erosion was imminent and would cause catastrophic flooding through the region.
The water would have had to traverse the entirety of what is now the channel, and the study states that the speed of which the water traveled could be measured at 106 cubic meters (over 250 million gallons) a second.
Dr Sanjeev Gupta, of the Department of Earth Science & Engineering at Imperial said, “This prehistoric event rewrites the history of how the UK became an island and may explain why early human occupation of Britain came to an abrupt halt for almost 120 thousand years.”
Posted by Josh Hill.
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