Pootler

This is an introduction to my 'Deep Past' series. You have found it either on my bike routes website (pootler.co.uk) or my gallimaufry (oildrumlane.co.uk) My aim was to produce a brief, phone-friendly, jargon-free and high-level summary of the origin and nature of the general features of the landscape of this area, leaving finer detail to other posts. It turned out that you have to dig deep, and then keep digging, deeper and deeper.  This involves many compromises, so it  will be thin gruel. I  cannot pose as any sort of expert, but  I have done some homework and stuck to mainstream interpretations and explanations for  a lot of this stuff, even when these are disputed. I f you can tell me how to improve it without lengthening it, please do.   Note that the series is not a single linear narrative. I have diverted or disappeared down the odd rabbit hole, where I think it adds to the story.  Posts 1 - 5 take you from the creation (!) through to the ...

I covered the rock foundations of our hills and valleys in previous posts, so now I will torture the analogy and examine the floor coverings. T his 5th post in the series starts from only 2.5 million years ago, with the ice age. In  geological terms, that is a distance from the present day no greater than the gaps in a country  bus timetable.   The debates about the constant changes to the landscape and the climate over millions of years have always made it hard for a non-specialist like me to sift out simple cause-and-effect relationships. As we get closer to the present, the increasing amount of fine-grained detail available makes it  even harder. So i f any professional paleogeologists are reading this,  stop now,  for the sake of your mental health.    At the point when we left the last post, what is now Southeast England was still connected to Europe.  The map below will give you some idea.  Southern England, 2 million years ago....

Dragging your bloodstained carcass   out of the apocalyptic hole left by the second life-eradicating asteroid impact  and into the 'Tertiary' Period,  you find a planet that is very slowly becoming more recognisable, mercifully shorn of giant reptiles and with mammals, birds and leafy trees.  Apparently, this is no longer woke geological terminology. I should be giving the period the correct geo-pronoun, which is (I think) the Danian Age in the Palaeocene epoch in the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Epoch of the Phanerozoic Aeon. (Point being, I am merrily skipping through around 5 of these Epochs and  20 Ages in this post, and I want you to know just how much grit and gyp I am sparing you!) There was no quick fix for the planet's hangover from the asteroid impact, and it also continued to suffer from the d ramatic fluctuations that had afflicted the climate, periodically morphing from icehouse to greenhouse.    T ectonic plates and the continents ato...