"The breaching of this land bridge between Dover and Calais was undeniably one of the most important events in British history, helping to shape our island nation's identity even today," Professor Sanjeev Gupta from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said. "When the ice age ended and sea levels rose, flooding the valley floor for good, Britain lost its physical connection to the mainland. Without this dramatic breaching Britain would still be a part of Europe. "Based on the evidence that we have seen, we believe the Dover Strait 450,000 years ago would have been a huge rock ridge made of chalk joining Britain to France, looking more like the frozen tundra in Siberia than the green environment we know today," Jenny Collier, from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said. "It would have been a cold world dotted with waterfalls plunging over the iconic white chalk escarpment that we see today in the White Cliffs of Dover," said Collier.The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Source: Economic Times April 05, 2017 09:33 UTC