Scientists Getting Closer to Finding Real-Life Atlantis Beneath the North Sea?

A team of researchers has recently discovered a fossilized forest beneath the North Sea renewing researchers' hope of being able to discover a long lost settlement, a real-life Atlantis.

"We are absolutely dead sure that we are very close to a settlement," said Vincent Gaffney of Bradford University in the U.K. "We have now identified the areas where the Mesolithic land surface is close to the surface [of the seafloor]. So we can use the dredges or grabs to get larger samples of whatever that surface is."

The discovery happened during a recent 11-day voyage into the North Sea. Although the area, also known as Doggerland, has been surveyed countless times - mostly by oil companies looking for fossil fuels- this latest expedition was "a chance to prioritize the finding of human settlements in the center of the North Sea."

Years ago, Gaffney let another team of researchers at the University of Birmingham to digitally map 18,000 square miles of Doggerland's landscape from before it was flooded, showing rivers, lakes, hills, and using seismic survey data mainly gathered by oil companies prospecting in the North Sea.

The area, which covers a vast swath between the eastern coast of Britain and mainland Europe, the same size as Colorado, was populated by thousands of hunter-gatherers, alongside other prehistoric creatures, who migrated with the changing seasons. They were forced to move to higher ground when the water levels rose and flooded the area about 8,000 years ago.

"Pretty much everything about the world changed in this period," Gaffney stated in an interview with Livescience. "The most pleasant places to live would have been on the great plains - which are now out at sea. This is where [the settlers] would have wanted to be, not in the hills. But it's all been lost."

Specialized dredges were used to grab samples and they plan to take millions of DNA samples from plants and animals buried beneath the sea, but the hard petrified wood of the submerged fossilized forest made it extremely difficult to do so. Their initial findings have already revealed so much and have already provided clues as to the locations of lost human settlements. Layers of compressed peat just below the seafloor indicate some areas were wetlands, which would have been the ideal for human habitation.

The researchers hope to return on another expedition with heavier dredges to make retrieving samples from the submerged fossilized areas easier.