William Smith was to mock Newton, inhabitant of the Oolitic Limestone, for not looking at those pebbles hard enough. Introduction I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. REVIEW 1 - after publication REVIEWER 1 SOURCE 1 SOURCE 1) In due course (but not yet in August 2012) the first 50 pages, with all their pics and diagrams, will probably be seen on Google books What Britain is and where it came from, just what's been going on around here for the last 500 million years: all is revealed, in a continuous slice around our seaside. Real geology is looking at real rock, and working out what the heck's been happening to it. Real geology isn't looking up the books and memorising all the long words. And as you wander along the edge of the sand, gradually slowing your eye to the beach-holiday speed of looking at things, you see small creatures, seashells and corals from hundreds of millions of years ago. Britain today lacks glaciers and volcanoes but the grand geological earth-shifter we do see is the sea, hard at it around our 6000 miles of coast. Here are cliffs bent and crumpled by two continents crashing into each other, and a band of red-hot basalt squeezed from somewhere in Scotland. Here are desert sand dunes emerging out of the ocean. While serious geologists poke among the old fridges in abandoned quarries, this book goes paddling in the rock pools, to examine the rock samples so perfectly polished up for us by the sea.īetween the lichen and the low-tide line, everything's out in the open to be looked at. But even better, I do like to see beside the seaside: sea stacks and wavecut platforms, ammonites and sand. I do like to be beside the seaside, yes indeed.
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