Eiffel Over

Tag: geology

  • Seeing the flow

    Seeing the flow

    Everything is in flow. Rivers and streams. The air blowing our heads and tall buildings. Information. Pedestrians and traffic. Materials, from mine, to factory, to building, to disassembly and on. Facades eroding. And even the mountains (the Alps grow by 1mm per year). 

    I saw on the beach yesterday in Devon a stunning reminder of very slow flow: the tightly folded bands of shale and sandstone on the Hartland peninsula. These were formed when two great tectonic plates collided to form Pangea. Massive tectonic forces causing things to move, very slowly.

    However slow the movement, once we realise everything is moving, we can decide are we going to swim with the current, swim against it or try to shift its course. 

    References

  • Clunch

    You read that right. No it is not an abbreviation of pack lunch. Clunch is a type of limestone, and one of the wonderful pieces of vocabulary I learnt this week from Mark, the stonemason who is renovating the front of our house.

    I asked Mark where he thought the Bath stone used in the surrounds to the windows and doors on our house came from. He pointed to a window jamb (another great word) and said which quarry he thought it came from, and not only that, but also whether it came from the top of the quarry of the bottom. All from the way the rock feels and can be worked.

    Here I am in my office writing about localising supply chains. And outside is someone who lives and breathes (literally I suspect from the dust) local supply. Who knows where rocks came from. Who can tell a story about why a block was placed one way or another. Who can find new uses for old pieces (a broken lintel has become a keystone elsewhere on the facade).

    He laughs at me and my Zoom calls. Fair enough. Thank you Mark for all your local wisdom, and your amazing work.

  • Bristol: from rainforest to desert

    Where I live, coal was so abundant near the surface that you could have dug a hole in your garden and found it lying there. This coal was laid down during the carboniferous period when Bristol was somewhere over the Equator and the ecosystem was abundant with life. This coal is fossilised life.

    Yet walk a few streets north-west and you find a band of red sandstone. By this time in its geological history, Bristol had drifted north towards the Tropic of Cancer and the area had become desert. No more fossilised life, no more coal – just scorched sand. Carry on further north and carbonate limestones return. The desert receded and life came back.

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  • Hello Planet Earth (goodbye Planet Money)

    Sunday morning we cycled through Bristol and up to Leigh Woods. We took the ‘high route’, choosing to climb up through the wealthy streets Clifton. Everywhere oozes money and wealth. The cavernous houses, gleaming cars, manicured front gardens and then the tiny shops of Clifton Village. Humans and their worldly possessions are all I can see.

    And then, all of a sudden, release. The ground gives way and we are soaring high over the Avon Gorge. As the Clifton Suspension Bridge leaps from one cliff to the other, I feel like I am looking at a giant fracture in the Earth’s crust, looking back in time through rock layers laid down millions of years ago. The scale changes. Humans are tiny again, a tiny feature of the surface. Nature and all the evidence of all its forces spread out before me.

    I yell ‘hello planet earth, and good bye planet money’, and we are off towards the woods.