10000-Year-Old Underwater Forest Discovered Off Norfolk Coast

An underwater forest, dating back 10,000 years, was recently discovered off the Norfolk Coast, shedding some light on this prehistoric environment.

These lush trees once stretched from England to Germany, and until now were submerged and hidden by layers of sand for millennia beneath the North Sea.

But thanks to a 2013 storm surge, and a pair of divers from the volunteer group Seasearch, the forest's existence has come to light, found just 200 meters (256 feet) from the shore. The diving team stumbled upon this canopy of leaves while studying marine life in the area.

"To start with I thought it was a piece of wreck because it looked like a piece of hull...it's the remains of a forest, probably oak trees that have been knocked flat, presumably by outwash from a glacier," Dawn Watson, 45, who found the site with fellow diver Rob Spray, told BBC News.

Some of the wood was compressed but they could still see whole tree trunks with branches, as well as various fish and plants that have claimed the forest as their home.

The underwater forest was part of an ancient landmass known as "Doggerland," which connected the United Kingdom to mainland Europe before it was flooded by the North Sea during the last Ice Age. Doggerland was once so vast that hunter-gatherers could have walked across it to get to Germany.

But as Spray explains, they would have had to battle miles of lush, dense forest that he describes as something only seen in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

"At one time it would have been a full-blown Tolkien-style forest, stretching for hundreds of miles," Spray told the Eastern Daily Press.

"It would have grown and grown and in those days there would have been no one to fell it, so the forest would have been massive," he added.

Amazingly, this isn't the only prehistoric forest to recently be discovered. The extreme storms from 2013 also unearthed similar forests off the west coast of Wales and in Cornwall, showing that the ocean still holds many unknown secrets.

For more great nature science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).