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North Sea
Europe's stormy shelf sea of fishermen and oil rigs
Grey, shallow, and notoriously stormy, the North Sea is the working sea of northwestern Europe. It sits on the broad continental shelf where the British Isles meet the mainland, a place of fierce gales, rich fishing grounds, and the platforms that made the region an oil power. For more than a thousand years it carried Frisian traders, Viking raiders, Hanseatic cogs, and the navies that decided Europe's fate, and its tides have repeatedly drowned coastlines and remade maps.
Covering about 570,000 square kilometres, the North Sea is mostly less than 100 metres deep, a flooded plain that was dry land — the lost world archaeologists call Doggerland — within the span of human habitation. Its only real deep is the Norwegian Trench, hugging the Norwegian coast and reaching about 700 metres in the Skagerrak. The Atlantic enters around Scotland and through the Dover Strait, driving strong tides and the storm surges that have devastated the Low Countries. Beneath its floor lie the oil and gas fields that transformed Britain and Norway.
This sea has been a crossroads of European life since prehistory. Its herring shoals fed medieval cities and underwrote the wealth of the Hanseatic League — its waters saw the rise of Dutch and British sea power and the great naval clash at Jutland in 1916. The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s reshaped national economies, and today the same windswept waters host the world's largest offshore wind farms, even as overfishing and warming press on its ecosystems.