Europe's Working Sea

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Few seas on Earth have been worked as continuously, or in as many different ways, as the North Sea. Its shallow, nutrient-rich waters have supported one of the world's great fishing grounds for centuries, herring above all, and the ports around its rim, from Hull to Bergen to Rotterdam, grew rich on that trade long before oil ever entered the picture. The rivers it receives, the Rhine, Elbe, Weser and Thames among them, made it the outlet for continental Europe's busiest inland waterways, so that goods moving between the European interior and the wider Atlantic world have crossed the North Sea for as long as there has been a European interior to move goods from. In the twentieth century it added a second identity: the discovery of oil and gas beneath the seabed from the 1960s onward turned it into one of the world's major offshore energy basins, dotted with production platforms and criss-crossed with pipelines that still supply a meaningful share of the United Kingdom and Norway's own energy. A sea that shallow and that busy is also a dangerous one; strong tidal currents and frequent storms have made it a byword for hazardous seafaring for as long as ships have worked it.