Thames

Rhine

Elbe

Channel

North Sea

HypotheticalNorth Sea landscape

10000 years ago (modified after

Coles 1998, Proc. Prehist. Soc.)

Of Land and Sea: Rising seas and sunken landscapesSea level has not always been the same. It fluctuates depending on the climate and other factors. In recent geological times the North Sea basin was affected by distinct climatic changes. The Pleistocene (~2.6 Mio - 11600 years ago) was characterized by the so-called ice ages alternating with phases of warmer conditions, during which the North Sea basin was either dry land temporarily covered by ice or flooded by the sea. With the warming of the climate and the subsequent deglaciation after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, about 20000 years ago) another rise of sea level was initiated that eventually led to the present day North Sea.

My research in GLOMAR hence focuses on the reconstruction of the Early Holocene sea-level rise and the associated contem-poraneous - now drowned - landscapes using peat deposits found in sediment cores offshore the German coast.

With the beginning of the Holocene (~ 11600 years ago – now), large parts of the North Sea basin were still dry land and even home to human hunter gatherer communities as archaeological data suggest. Within the following millennia most of the land was lost to the rising sea, resulting in the extent of the North Sea, as we know it today. However, the exact pro-cesses and timing, especially of the earliest postglacial flooding are not yet fully understood.

Rike Zimmermann, GLOMAR PhD Student

Image: NASA