Doggerland, Zealandia and the Lands Under the Sea

During the last ice age so much water was locked in ice sheets that the sea stood about 120 to 130 m lower than today. Wide plains that are now sea floor were dry land: Doggerland joined Great Britain to continental Europe, the Bering Land Bridge joined Siberia to Alaska, and Sundaland joined Borneo, Sumatra and Java to Asia. Zealandia is older and larger still: a continent of about 4.9 million km² that is about 94% under water today.

Doggerland, the land now under the North Sea, beside the United Kingdom.

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The numbers

Land	Where	Size (about)	Under the sea since
Zealandia	South-west Pacific	4.9 million km²	tens of millions of years
Sundaland (now-sunken part)	Southeast Asia	2.3 million km²	8,000 to 10,000 years ago
Bering Land Bridge	Between Siberia and Alaska	1.6 million km²	about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago
Doggerland	Southern North Sea	150,000 km²	about 8,000 years ago

The sizes of the ice-age lands depend on how low the sea is taken to be and on where the outline stops, so published figures differ. TrueSize draws them from today's sea floor (NOAA ETOPO 2022) down to the sea level of about 20,000 years ago, leaving out the parts that lay under ice sheets. The coasts are approximate: the sea floor has changed since then through sediment and land movement.

Doggerland on the timeline

Doggerland shrank in steps as the ice melted. The timeline shows its coast at several dates: wide lowlands around 10,000 BC, the Dogger Bank cut off as an island by 8,000 BC, and the last low islands around 6,200 BC, when a tsunami from the Storegga slide off Norway struck the area. The Bering Land Bridge and Sundaland have their own timeline entries from the last ice age onward.

Doggerland on the timeline in 8000 BC.

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Zealandia, the hidden continent

Zealandia broke away from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana about 80 million years ago and sank. New Zealand and New Caledonia are its largest parts above water. Geologists described it as a continent in 2017. At about 4.9 million km² it is larger than India and about two thirds of the size of Australia.

Zealandia beside Australia.

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Try it yourself

1. Search for "Doggerland", "Zealandia", "Beringia" or "Sundaland" ("Search for a country or region…") and add it.
2. Drag a country you know beside it at the same latitude, or load all of them with Advanced → Load → Load All Sunken Lands.
3. To watch the coast change, switch to the timeline, search for "Doggerland" and play the years from 10,000 BC.

More comparisons

• What did the world look like in 1800?
• The largest empires in history
• How big are giant icebergs?
• Tutorial: historical borders timeline

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