Between Mars and Jupiter, 470 million years ago, there was a massive collision between two 100km-sized chunks of rock – this solar system’s biggest bang of the last billion years. It created a massive cloud of smaller fragments. Some of these landed on the earth, falling at a rate at least a hundred times greater… Continue reading The Great Ordovician meteor shower
Category: History
Cornwall: tin, pasties and the world
The county of Cornwall is like England’s foot, stretching out languorously into the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. Now a relatively poor area, best known for fishing and tourism, it has a proud industrial past based on mining, notably of tin. Once the most important thing about Britain, Cornish tin is now distributed across the world.… Continue reading Cornwall: tin, pasties and the world
Mexican silver in Tudor England
Geology and history have much in common. Both seek to understand the past by objective analysis of the traces it has left in the present. Both arose from the application of hand and mind to the study of particular things (outcrops of rock, historical documents). Both now benefit from more technological forms of analysis, as… Continue reading Mexican silver in Tudor England
Ludchurch – sandstone, landslips and a beheading game
The ‘Dark Peak’, the land to the south and east of Macclesfield rising up above the Cheshire plain, is a wild place. We are in England though, and even here in the North, things are only mildly wild. This is no wilderness, we are only 25 miles from Manchester, once the ‘workshop of the world’.… Continue reading Ludchurch – sandstone, landslips and a beheading game