Evidence of Britain’s separation from Europe

Researchers have found evidence of how ancient Britain separated from Europe, which happened in two stages, they report. Nearly 450,000 years ago, when Earth was in the grip of an ice age, ice stretched right across the North Sea, from Britain to Scandinavia. The low sea levels meant that the entire English Channel was dry land, a frozen tundra landscape, crisscrossed by small rivers. Based on the evidence that we've seen, we believe the Dover Strait 450,000 years ago would have been a huge rock ridge made of chalk joining Britain to France, looking more like the frozen tundra in Siberia than the green environment we know today. Dr Jenny Collier Department of Earth Science and Engineering Britain's separation from mainland Europe is believed to be the result of spill over from a proglacial lake - a type of lake formed in front of an ice sheet - in the North Sea, but this has remained unproven. Now, researchers from Imperial College London and their colleagues from institutes in Europe show that the opening of the Dover Strait in the English Channel occurred in two episodes, where an initial lake spill over was followed by catastrophic flooding. Ten years ago, the researchers from Imperial College London revealed geophysical evidence of giant valleys on the seafloor in the central part of English Channel.