Deep Past : Intro.

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 is 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. 

This involves many compromises, so it will be thin gruel. I have stuck to mainstream interpretations and explanations and I cannot pose as an expert, but I have done some homework. If you can tell me how to improve this stuff without lengthening it, please do. Note that the series is not a single linear narrative. I have diverted or disappeared down a rabbit hole where I think it adds to the the understanding of our area.

Posts 1 - 5  take you from the creation (!) through to the arrival of humans.

Posts 6 - 9  stretches to Feudal times with more about the inhabitants.

Posts 10 - 13 look at the gradual creation of the rural landscape you see today. 

A problem was where to start. In the context of Geological time scales, our scenery is nearly all the last chapter in the planet's long and eventful history. I like the analogy of an ancient pub which has changed a lot over time. Sitting in it, you see the decorations and furnishings but struggle to envision how the whole place fits together and looks the way it does. So my aim here is to start by looking under the floorboards at the foundations and then inspecting the brickwork, before moving on to the questionable improvements and décor.   

Of course, you might have a view of how it all started, your very own creation myth.  Me, I believe in Terry Pratchett's version. The idea that we are swanning (!) around on the back of a giant turtle is also found in Hinduism as well as other Indian, Chinese and Native American religions. That cannot be a coincidence, can it?  

The Great A'Tuin

Terry even foresaw the subsequent management issues: 

"Some people” – and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past – “think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run.  A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is." 

Top scientists now believe that Terry's take on this isn't entirely supported by the evidence. Turtles steer a steady course but the Earth doesn't. It's axis isn't vertical and it wobbles and wanders in it's orbit around the Sun. Hence the seasons, but also some massive longer term changes in the climate. If we turned our carbon-fuelled heaters off and left the planet to its own devices, we should be welcoming the glaciers back in 50,000 years or so.

And that isn't the only agent of long-term radical change in our environment. The planet and its surface are themselves restless. Change is the only constant, as I will explain in the next post in this series: 

Link : Hell to High Water