This isle is full of wonder

GEOLOGY? A bit like economics, the famously boring science? I confess I suffered the prejudice—agriculture and history being my thing, both of them vital in every sense— but Robert Muir-Wood’s voyage through the past 66 million years of the making of the British landscape has biblical-level drama on almost every other page. Flood, fire, ice… or, perhaps, the formation in rock, sand, mud and lava of these isles is best conceived of as fierce poetry.

- Kate Green

This Volcanic Isle: The Violent Processes that Forged the British Landscape 

Robert Muir-Wood (Oxford University Press, £20)
The hills are shadows, and they flow, From form to form, and  nothing stands; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands,  Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 
(Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’)

There is a knowingness in the author’s dotted, select quotations from Tennyson (‘the most scientifically literate of poets’); the proper telling of the island creation story requires imagination, as well as stone-cold fact and theory.

What a geological genesis Britain had! Dr Muir-Wood takes a broadly chronological approach, beginning with the Cretaceousera seas, submerging almost the entire place in tropical shallow water filled with coccoliths, microscopic, shelled phytoplankton. As the coccoliths died, their bodies sank; a perpetual submarine snowstorm that deposited sediment on the seabed—the chalk that dominates southern and eastern Britain (Local Distinctiveness, May 1). In Sussex, the chalk layer is 560m (1,837ft) thick—once, we were inhabitants of Albion, the white land, from the same word root as albino.