Figure 1: Location of the >22,000km2 of English 3D Seismic Surveys within the Southern North Sea (data courtesy of http://www.ukdeal.co.uk and CDA Ltd.)
Figure 2: Image of the Bathymetry (topography) of the North Sea area. The 6250 km2 covered in this paper is marked by the position of the red box. (ETOPO2 v.2 bathymetric dataset provided, courtesy of NOAA [National Geophysical Data Centre].)
Figure 3: Simplified cross-section (not to scale) of the stratigraphy of the Pleistocene and Holocene of the Dogger Bank area. Adapted from Laraminie (1989a, 1989b).
Figure 4: The structure of the Holocene landscape can clearly be seen in this Seismic timeslice taken at 0.076s. The quality of the seismic data allows the image to be interpreted in a manner similar to satellite imagery. Coastlines, Estuaries and large fluvial features in this image can all be seen to be integral parts of the Mesolithic landscape of this region.
Figure 5: Map illustrating the emergent parts of the continental shelves worldwide during the last glacial maximum. The figure assumes a glacial eustatic lowstand of 120m below present sea level (Fairbanks, 1989) and does not take into account glacially induced flexural uplift in high-latitude regions adjacent to large ice sheets or neotectonic (Holocene) uplift or subsidence. (ETOPO2 v.2 bathymetric dataset provided, courtesy of NOAA [National Geophysical Data Centre].)
Figure 6: Schematic illustration of the main topographic features of the Holocene Landscape of the area. The area in this paper is contained within the red box. Other fluvial features (light blue) and intertidal currents (green) represent schematically preliminary results of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project. Discoveries made during the course of the thesis study are in dark blue. The approximate location of the coastlines observed within the seismic data are marked on in black lines. (ETOPO2 v.2 bathymetric dataset provided, courtesy of NOAA [National Geophysical Data Centre].)
Figure 7: An illustration of some of the early results of site prediction. Figure 7 (A) shows a predicted site (orange dot) in relation to the seismic data within the study area. It can be observed to fall close to the shoreline and both the estuarine and fluvial environments. In 3D View of Figure 7 (B) the predicted resource distribution for this site is shown (scale bar is relative), which suggests that resource utilisation of the coastline may have been favoured by the inhabitants of the region.
Figure 8: This movie clearly illustrates the benefits of virtual reality technology when dealing with marine prehistory. The movie begins by moving from a recreation of the seabed in the area today. The movie then moves onto a visualisation of the marine inundation of the Mesolithic landscape of this area during 12,000BP to 9,000BP. Through this visualisation it becomes possible to begin to appreciate the vast temporal and spatial changes that are recorded and preserved in the submerged Mesolithic landscape of this region. (Movie courtesy of Steve Wilkes of HP VISTA at the University of Birmingham).
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