Origins
During the last ice age, which ended approximately 12,000 years ago, the sea level was about 60 meters lower and what is now the North Sea was dry land. With the melting of the ice caps, the level rose to form the North Sea, reaching the current coast line around the beginning of the Holocene era, approximately 7000 years ago. Tidal action transported large quantities of sand to form a line of dunes extending over 500 km from contemporary Belgium through the Netherlands to the mouth of the river Elbe in Germany. The sea broke through the dunes in many places to form the Wadden Islands, with the low-lying country behind becoming the tidal Wadden mudflats.
Read more about this topic: Frisian Islands
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)