Walking Zero by Chet Raymo

Author:Chet Raymo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

How to account for this rhythm in the rocks? I have posed this puzzle for my students, and after a bit of head-scratching they figure out a solution. All of southeastern England is underlain by the same sequence of sedimentary rocks, with the oldest strata exposed at the central Weald and the youngest at London. The layers of rock have been gently folded and eroded so that today different strata are exposed at the surface. (See figure 3-5.) Of course, having the modern geologic map of Britain hanging on the wall of the classroom helps solve the puzzle. A solution was not so obvious when there was no countrywide geologic map available. The man who first conceived such a map was the self-educated son of a blacksmith, William Smith (1769-1839).

Smith was born in the village of Churchill in Oxfordshire in the year that James Watt was granted a patent for the condensing steam engine, an event that might be taken as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. He died not long after Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology. His life aptly illustrates the intimate connection between the industrialization of Britain and the birth of geology as a science. During the seventy years of Smith's lifetime Britain changed dramatically and irreversibly. Population soared, but also shifted, away from tiny agricultural villages sprinkled across the countryside to big, crowded industrial centers in the Midlands, southern Wales, the northeast coast near Newcastle, and the region around Glasgow in Scotland. A comparison of a population density map of Britain for the mid-i8oos with a geologic map shows a striking coincidence between people and coal. Within a few generations, a nation of farmers became a nation of coal extractors and burners. Powered machinery did the work of the hand: spinning, weaving, forging, and pumping water from mines. The hiss and rattle of steam locomotives replaced the call of the cuckoo as the characteristic sound of the countryside. Only the great commercial center of London is an exception to the coincidence of population and coal, but canals and then railroads were built to bring coal to the capital for the heating of homes and businesses, together with the useful products of the industrial centers in the Midlands.

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