This Volcanic Isle

• Main Author: Muir-Wood, Robert
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2024
• Subjects: Norwegian Sea; Albion; Tennyson
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198871620.001.0001

Abstract This Volcanic Isle: The Violent Processes that Forged the British Landscape tells the story of the tectonic and volcanic processes that have formed the British Isles and Ireland since the era of the dinosaurs. The original Albion, which was raised out of the Chalk Sea around 65 million years ago, was a Honshu-sized, densely forested island surrounded by chalk cliffs, with two lines of great volcanoes, which became the site of two trial ‘spreading ridge’ plate boundaries. As southern England became the foothills of the great Pyrenees mountain range and tectonics short-circuited between the Alpine and Norwegian Sea plate boundaries, Devon’s Sticklepath Fault saw several kilometres of displacement and thousands of major earthquakes. While exploring the forging of the British landscape, there are diversions to visit materials formed along the way, from the sarsens used to construct Stonehenge to the Olympic curling stones harvested from a remote Scottish island. Our tour of the evidence also sees several appearances from Charles Darwin in the less familiar role as a geologist, the science-poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the mathematician who made a fractal icon out of the west coast of Britain: Benoit Mandelbrot.