Like I showed in the images above, the paleo-channels of the ice age rivers are still there, under the water. And they'd still combine and run again if sea levels fell once more. The Solent itself's the submerged, flooded channel of an ice-age river, after al- and most of the surrounding sea ports would still be situated along the banks of the river and its tributaries. With the former Solent River Valley being the main reason why the Isle of Wight came into existence at all in the first place. The sea level may be falling, but if there's still rainfall, those rivers'll still keep flowing all the way to the sea (though it's still anyone's guess how the rivers' respective flows might be altered by the ASB's POD), and permit riverine trade to endure.How do the ships in the docks and slipways at London, Southampton, Portsmouth, Dover, Cardiff, Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, Dublin, Queenstown, Middlesbrough, Glasgow etc get to it, however?
On wheels?
View attachment 80842
It'd still be fairly sheltered, and have access to the Atlantic. Along with Cork & Dublin (where as you can see on that map you included, there'd now be convenient new natural bays to harbor ships in, at the new mouths of the Lee and Linney Rivers, looking out over the Celtic and Irish Seas, both of which are still open to the Atlantic). Sure, they'd have to move the docks in Cork and Dublin c.5 to 8 miles downriver respectively; but the historical port city of Bristol's docks were 8 miles inland as well, and Bristol still survived, and continued to thrive after they moved its docks downstream to the mouth of the Avon.
So the UK's capacity to traverse the seas certainly isn't an automatic write-off ITTL. But maintaining control over (the former island of, now peninsula of) Ireland's just gotten way, way more important for the British. And for further context, the new coastlines in the North Sea and British Isles, post ASB-event ITTL, would roughly correspond to the '8000 B.C.' coastline on the map below- from which one can see that there are a fair few other pre-existing paleolithic river channels which'll re-emerge, the mouths of which'd still be prime sites to relocate any newly-built docks to, from the former mouths of their respective tributaries:
All the rivers which feed into The Humber and The Wash estuaries'll all merge back into one as tributaries of the 'Greater Ouse River'; likewise, all of the rivers which feed into the Severn Estuary into the 'Greater Severn River', and all of the rivers which feed into the Eastern Irish Sea south of the Isle of Man are set to be tributaries of the restored 'Greater Mersey River'- all of which'd comfortably have a greater flow rate, and thus presumably carve out deeper channels, than the present-day River Severn.
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