Researchers at the Imperial College London and the UK Hydrographic Service have announced that they think they know why Britain isn’t attached to France and the rest of the European continent. Apparently, between 200000 and 450000 years ago there was massive flood that was so large (one million cubic metres/second) and continued for so long (months!) that it scoured the land and created what is today the English Channel. High-resolution sonar scans in the English Channel has revealed scour marks and landforms that are consistent with what you would expect to see in such a catastrophic flood event. Apparently, there’s an article in the July issue of Nature, though I haven’t seen it, yet.

The research was conducted using data collected for another purpose, which makes this particularly interesting. One has to wonder what other discoveries are lurking in data people have collected for one purpose and then stuck on a shelf because they’ve finished with it.

Very cool research!