Page 28 - ARUBA TODAY

A28 SCIENCE
Wednesday 5 april 2017

1st Brexit: Study shows Britain’s original split from Europe

FRANK JORDANS of a dam onto the chalk Britain was an island by
Associated Press and limestone rock below. then.
BERLIN (AP) — It was a lit- “They are just astonishing, a Sea levels fell and rose
eral Brexit — Britain’s geo- hundred meters deep and over the following millen-
graphical separation from up to several kilometers nia, allowing animals and
mainland Europe — which in diameter,” said Gupta. later humans to cross to
newly published research “They only occur in this strip Britain from the continent.
reveals to have been between Dover and Cal- But the preconditions for it
caused by a period of slow ais, parallel to the Channel to be an island were cre-
erosion, then a cataclys- Tunnel.” ated in those two events,
mic split. To their surprise, the re- said Gupta.
Using unprecedented un- searchers also discovered “Without them Britain
dersea measurements, sci- a major valley that cuts would always have been
entists have reconstructed through the depressions, a promontory of Europe,”
the geological process that probably caused by Ice he said.
carved the strait separat- Age rivers from one or “And Britain’s history would
ing Britain from the Europe- more lakes in northern Eu- have been completely dif-
an mainland, now known In this June 9, 2016 file photo a Chinese tourist looks out from a rope draining to the west. ferent because it’s actually
as the English Channel. section of the White Cliffs of Dover in south east England towards This water eventually broke the inability to easily cross
The split foreshadowed, the Strait of Dover, marking the narrowest point of the English through a sediment dam that creates this island na-
Channel which separates Britain from mainland Europe.
and arguably contributed Associated Press that had built up in front of tion.”
to, Britain’s recent political ice sheets, causing a sec- Gupta noted that the study
break with the continent ond, cataclysmic flood. resulted from a 10-year ef-
by creating an island that gan some 450,000 years would come to have such “We think it probably hap- fort by scientists from both
was difficult to access and ago when a vast prehistor- a significant influence on pened about 160,000 sides of the Channel — a
developed alongside, but ic lake began spilling over Britain’s relationship with years ago,” said Gupta. collaboration that could
separated from Europe. a rock ridge that spanned the rest of Europe. This is supported by fos- become more difficult fol-
Shakespeare, in “Richard the stretch between what Sanjeev Gupta, a geolo- sil evidence showing that lowing last year’s “Brexit”
II,” hymned the island as are now the ports of Do- gist at Imperial College, the same creatures ex- referendum to leave the
“this fortress built by nature ver, England, and Calais, London, who co-wrote the isted along the length of European Union that’s al-
for herself, against infec- France. paper, said the idea that the Channel some 125,000 ready weighing on scien-
tion and the hand of war.” That initial breach was fol- the Channel resulted from years ago, suggesting that tific research in the U.K.q
In a paper published Tues- lowed 300,000 years later an overflowing lake was
day in the journal Nature by a massive flood which first proposed in the late
Communications, re- gouged its way through 19th century. But for a long
searchers detail the two- the narrow passage, cre- time scientists lacked the
stage separation that be- ating the waterway that data to explain how it hap-
pened.
Together with colleagues
from France and Belgium,
Gupta used sonar and seis-
mic measurements of the
sea floor to reconstruct the
landscape beneath the
waves.
They discovered a line of
bowl-shaped depressions
that appeared to have
been created by vast wa-
terfalls crashing over the lip