I'm going to keep on harping on about land in the middle of the North Sea until I'm hoarse!
It's difficult to convince people of the idea partly because it seems so unlikely. The level of the seabed east of Shetland is over 100 metres below present sea level. The idea that a depth of material of that height could have been washed away in the recent past is too incredible to be believed.
There is lots evidence to support this notion , but it's a bit like being aware of something that's invisible only by the touch of the breeze on your skin as it passes. It requires the willingness to consider the possibility.
The first piece of evidence is actually archaeological. A flint artefact was discovered in a borehole in the floor of the North Sea half way between Shetland and Norway. It was identified, by Caroline Wickham-Jones , as a piece of prehistoric struck flint. How an article created by a prehistoric human could have been deposited so far from land is a bit of a head- scratcher.
The second piece of evidence referrs to a meltwater surge that drained off from glaciers on Norway and Sweden at 12,000BP. Water and ice fell into the Skaggerak and flowed down a wide trench beside the coast of Norway, called the Norwegian Channel.
As sea level in the area was 60 metres below our sea level at 12,000BP, and the height of the surge , as demonstrated on the sea level graphs on the sketch below , was 10 metres, the surge was supported at 50 metres below current sea level.
This 50 metres surge was supported along most of the length of the Norwegian Channel, dissipating in the Atlantic Ocean.
As there was deep water against the English and Scottish coasts the west bank of the Norwegian Channel may have been a narrow strip of land running north from Doggerland to the Atlantic coast, where the flint artefact was found.
This looks suspiciously as if prehistoric people may have been able to walk on land in the northern North Sea, and that the land they walked on was higher than we thought.
What do you think?
Detailed, if longwinded, analysis is in the blog:-
http://orkneyriddler.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-orkney-riddle.html
