The watery map of Fishing Clash is continuously expanding, and our newest arrival is closer to the home of Ten Square Games. We’re dropping our anchors in the Baltic Sea, Fishing Clash’s latest fishery, so if any of our Anglers wish to stock up and conquer the related Events early, we recommend visiting the TSG.STORE for all the best deals the sea can offer! For those interested in some of the secrets of the Baltic Sea, in today’s article we have a story of forests and settlements. A tale of change. Make yourselves comfortable, dear Anglers, and let’s take a peek beneath the Baltic’s waves.

A young sea with an old memory

The Baltic Sea is geologically young, barely 10,000 years old, a child among the various other seas on our planet. One born from the collapse of melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, stretching over 377,000 square kilometers (145,550 square miles), bordered by nine countries, and connected to the North Sea through narrow straits. It is a basin shaped as much by climate as by land. It is also one of the least saline seas in the world – its waters are a delicate mix of oceanic saltwater and freshwater from hundreds of rivers, enclosed enough to feel almost like a vast lake. The Baltic’s tides are minimal, its floor – shallow. But what it lacks in depth or salt, it makes up for in sediment and stories.

The Baltic has not always been a sea. Much of what is now underwater was once land: forests, meadows, river deltas, and settlements. As glaciers melted, sea levels rose, and the shoreline began to creep inland. Slowly and irrevocably. The sea has been rising for millennia, and its relentless advance has transformed coastlines, erased settlements, and submerged entire worlds. Today, beneath its surface, lie the traces of those worlds – almost untouched, waiting to be explored, and offering glimpses into ancient knowledge.

Poel: where trees still stand

Just off the coast of Poel Island in Northern Germany, marine archaeologists discovered a landscape not with stone or ruins, but with trees. Beneath the shallow waters near Timmendorfer Strand lies a forest. Still rooted, structured, almost eerily intact. The trunks are upright, embedded in the same ground where they once grew freely more than 8,000 years ago. When storms pull back the silt and waves fall still, their tops emerge briefly above the water, black and slick, like half-remembered thoughts surfacing in sleep.

These are not driftwoods or debris washed in from somewhere else. They are pine, alder, and oak trees that grew during the early Holocene, in a cool temperate climate after the Ice Age had loosened its grip. Their preservation is nearly perfect, thanks to the oxygen-poor marine mud that blanketed them as the sea rose. Beneath the forest floor, scientists have found intact root systems, peaty soil, and preserved layers of pollen, which together allow for an astonishingly detailed reconstruction of the ancient ecosystem. Tree rings tell of dry years and damp ones; pollen deposits whisper the rhythms of changing seasons.

At that time, the sea was still many kilometers away. Then, over generations, the shoreline crept inland. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a storm or flood that consumed the forest. It simply slipped beneath the surface as waters rose year by year, until the trees were lost from sight.

In recent years, the site has been the focus of research by institutions in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, combining sonar mapping with core sampling and underwater photogrammetry. What they are recovering is not just a forest, but a place. A living, growing world that died not by destruction, but by quiet abandonment.

Lolland: where people stayed until the end

Across the Fehmarn Belt, along Denmark’s Lolland coast, the Baltic Sea holds a different memory. Not a botanical one, but human. In 2015, construction work around the Fehmarn Belt tunnel unearthed an extraordinary archaeological site: a Neolithic shoreline settlement preserved beneath the silt and sea. Wooden structures lay just below the surface – palisades and platforms built to manage the land, mark territory, or fish along a changing coast. Hearths, ceramic fragments, flint tools, and animal bones were all found embedded in what was once lagoon-edge mud.

But it was something far more fragile that gripped the archaeologists. In the soft, ancient layers of soil were preserved footprints – of children, adults, and domesticated dogs – pressed into the once-wet ground, now sealed beneath the seabed. The prints trace paths across the mud: someone walking, someone running, someone pausing. These are not symbols of catastrophe, but gestures of routine, remnants of lives unfolding under uncertain skies.

The people who lived there did not flee the sea. They adapted. They burned vegetation to create clearings, modified shorelines, and continued returning to this place even as waters rose slowly but steadily. Over time, the land slipped under the waves, and the community vanished from the surface. But its presence endured. Not as ruins, but as impressions etched in soil and sealed in mud.

Research teams from Denmark’s National Museum and collaborating universities have studied the site using precision techniques: radiocarbon dating, sedimentology, and underwater mapping. What emerged was not just a picture of a settlement, but of an entire way of living at the edge – a culture accustomed to instability, negotiating with a landscape in transition.

Between forests and footprints, yesterday and tomorrow

Yes, Poel and Lolland tell us different stories, but they are joined by the same water. In Poel, the forest still stands, even if no one walks it. In Lolland, the footprints remain, even if the feet that made them are long gone. They are two memories held within the same young Baltic Sea. These are not stories of sudden calamity. There was no flood, no fire – only the inevitability of slow change, the quiet realignment of coastlines. These are tales of resilience and eventual disappearance of all that could not move fast enough.

What lies beneath the Baltic is not material for museums or tourism, but a deeper reminder. These sunken traces remind us that the world has always been in flux, and that human presence is ephemeral, but traceable.

From a scientific perspective, these sites offer invaluable data. The sediments preserve continuous environmental records of early Holocene climate shifts. Pollen and spores help reconstruct vegetation cycles with annual precision. Core samples contain peat, charcoal, and microfossils that build an ecological narrative spanning millennia. In places like Poel, tree rings encode droughts and wet periods; in Lolland, the patterns of burned wood and ash reflect how humans shaped their world with fire and earth.

Archaeologically, they offer something rarely preserved: not structures or artifacts, but behavior. The footprints in Lolland show movement, decision, and hesitation. The palisades suggest deliberate attempts to hold territory, maintain rhythm, and adapt to change.

Yet perhaps their most important role lies in what they tell us about our world today. As global sea levels rise once again, we are faced with similar questions: how do we live on land that may one day disappear? How do we adapt when the shape of our environment is no longer stable? These ancient sunken sites are not simply echoes of loss. They’re precedents: lessons in adaptation, resilience, and eventual surrender.

A sea of change, a sea of action

When we cast our lines into the Baltic, we engage with a sea shaped by time, endurance, and quiet transformation. It’s fitting, then, that with the launch of this fishery, our Fishing Quest makes a return, offering Anglers fresh challenges to face and rewards to earn. Just as the past teaches us to listen closely to the subtle changes in our world, we’re also turning our attention to the present: in upcoming Events, we’ll shine a spotlight on the issues of pollution and ghost nets: abandoned fishing gear that haunts modern seas, threatening marine life and ecosystems. The Baltic, young as it is, holds the memory of those who adapted to change. Now it’s our turn. Let’s fish – and let’s do it consciously.