Skip to main content

The history under our feet

 A new guest post by Kate Kelly. Kate is a marine scientist by day but by night she writes SF thrillers for kids. Her debut novel Red Rock, a Cli-Fi* thriller for teens, is published by Curious Fox. She lives in Dorset with her husband, two daughters and assorted pets and blogs at scribblingseaserpent.blogspot.co.uk

* No, I didn't know either. It stands for Climate Fiction, often dystopian fiction where climate change has had a significant impact on the environment.

GUEST POST

Most of the time you will find me somewhere on the internet talking about writing with my fellow authors, but Brian’s invitation to appear as a guest on his blog has given me the opportunity to talk about my other great passion – geology!

During the day when I’m not writing fiction I work as a marine scientist. I studied first geology and then oceanography at university and both these subjects have remained very close to my heart – especially the geology. And I’m lucky because I am able to indulge this passion – I live on the Jurassic Coast (The southern one – there are two).

What I love so much about geology is the way it influences the landscape around us – it is like the skeleton underneath the fields, determining where the hills persist and the valleys form, the balance between rugged headland and sandy bay. I love the stories it tells of ancient swamps and shallow seas, vast forests and marauding reptiles.

I stood in a quarry once, looking at a rockface - but that rockface was a section through time. I saw the ancient channels where a river once flowed, and the roots of the plants that had grown along its banks – cut off at ground level and singed to carbon by the overlying lava flow – an ancient cataclysm that had destroyed that peaceful valley.

I can stand on the beach near my home, sand ripples beneath my boots, and stare at ripples that look just the same, but are millions of years old, frozen into the rocks of the cliff face, reminding me that once before there was a sandy beach on this spot.

The Jurassic coast where I live is, in itself, a section through time. The rocks here span a period of time that straddles the Jurassic on either side.

We start with the Triassic red sandstone cliffs of East Devon, laid down in an ancient desert on the edge of an evaporating sea. We can see the ancient dunes in the cliff face, and find layers of gypsum left behind as what water there was evaporated in the sun.

As we head east the rocks change as the seas encroached, through the Triassic to the life rich seas of the Jurassic proper – ammonites and belemnites teemed in these waters as the occasional icthyosaurus swam by.

Then the seas shallowed to swamp and at Lulworth Cove you can stand on the remains of a fossil forest, giant tree ferns, their roots and stumps now turned to stone.

Finally the seas encroached once more – the eastern most layers are the chalks exposed at Old Harry Rocks – a deeper sea, these rocks made up of the carbonate shells of tiny plankton.

This is a section of coastline that can give you a broadbrush sweep through time – but if you start to look closer you can see the finer detail of that changing landscape – the local variations – where the land shifted along a fault line – did the Earth shake at that moment? I wonder if it frightened any dinosaurs?

Once there was a desert, then there was a swamp. Now there is a town. I wonder how much of that town will remain for geologists in the future?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope