An ancient "Atlantis" located in the North Sea off the coast of Norway was wiped out by a deadly tsunami thousands of years ago, researchers in the UK found.
The settlement known as Doggerland, a low-lying landmass, is believed to have been an oasis full of marshes and lagoons that enabled the civilization to flourish, the BBC reported. But artifacts and human remains from the time period do not date past the time a tsunami, caused by an underwater landslide, occurred in the area 8,200 years ago. Researchers believe the tsunami- 16 feet in height- completely covered Doggerland, which remains lost to this day.
"It was abandoned by Mesolithic tribes about 8,000 years ago, which is when the Storegga slide happened," Jon Hill, from Imperial College London, told the BBC.
"The impact on anyone who was living on Doggerland at the time would have been massive- comparable to the Japanese tsunami of 2011."
Sea levels at the time Doggerland existed were much lower than present-day levels, making it possible for people to walk between northern Germany and East Anglia, the BBC reported. Overtime sea levels began to rise, creating a freshwater basin in the middle of Doggerland that made animal life thrive.
"In Mesolithic times, this was paradise," Bernhard Weninger, from the University of Cologne in Germany, told the BBC. Weninger was not involved in the study.
Bones and tools from the animals and humans who lived at the time have been repeatedly picked up by fishing nets in the North Sea. But radiocarbon dating places all of the remains at the same time of the Storegga landslide, which involved 3,000 cubic kilometers of sediment.
"If you took that sediment and laid it over Scotland, it would cover it to a depth of 8 meters," or 26 feet, Hill told the BBC. Doggerland was less than 5 meters, 16 feet, in height.
"It is therefore plausible that the Storegga slide was indeed the cause of the abandonment of Doggerland in the Mesolithic," researchers wrote in a paper for the journal Ocean Modelling, where the findings were published.