Archaeologists are uncovering Britain's Atlantis, a whole country submerged under the North Sea

(Image credit: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images)

published 2 September 2015

Roughly 8,000 years ago, Doggerland was swallowed up by the rising North Sea — researchers believe a 5-meter-tall tsunami may be to blame — never to be seen again. Now, archaeologists are working to resurrect the long-buried landmass, which was "once the home to thousands of stone age settlers and was an important land bridge between Britain and Northern Europe," The Telegraph reports. Doggerland was inhabited by humans from around 10,000 BC until some 8,000 years ago, when it was flooded in what is described as a "single titanic event" at the end of the last ice age.

In a reconstruction project of unprecedented scale, archaeologists at the University of Bradford are using seabed mapping data to create a 3D chart showing the country's landscape, including its rivers, hills, and coastlines. Ships are collecting sediment samples from the submerged Doggerland to discern what plants and animals once lived there. "This is the first time that this type of reconstruction has been attempted at this detail and scale in any marine environment," David Smith from the University of Birmingham told The Telegraph.

Although University of Bradford professor Vince Gaffney says that archaeologists "have known for a long time" that Doggerland could hold valuable insights into how an ancient society reacted to climate change, he says that archaeologists "have lacked the tools to investigate this area properly." But now, archaeologists may finally be able to unearth what Gaffney says could be Doggerland's "unique and important information about early human life in Europe."