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.
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