Through The Sandglass

BGS OpenGeoscience: finally, an online resource

 

As a taxpayer in the UK, it has always struck me as ironic that, for freely available information, images, publications - and, I should add, very personal help with enquiries - I have for years relied on the US Geological Survey: their web resources are extraordinary. My guilt, such as it was, has always been assuaged by the fact that I was a US taxpayer for close to twenty years - I could rationalise that I was simply enjoying a return on my investment. My own national geological survey, the BGS (you can infer what the "B" stands for) has historically been, to put it bluntly, completely useless as a resource for the country's citizens (well, actually, "subjects," beholden and daily filled with gratitude to our sovereign as we are). But now, as part of the celebration of its 175th anniversary, the BGS has opened up, given us grateful subjects a free glimpse under its skirts, as it were.

"BGS OpenScience" is a great start to providing access to the resources of the survey and the geology of the UK. I have only begun to explore what's available, but, like, I suspect, all writers - particularly of blogs like this one - I am always on the lookout for images that I cannot supply from my own collection. And, furthermore, there's that great satisfaction in viewing images of geological phenomena - landscapes and structures that lead the viewer to say "wow - got to add that to my list of places to go." But then there's also the fascination of scale, views of our planet that cross many orders of magnitude. So, in my preliminary investigations of the BGS site, I went straight to "pictures," followed this through to the "GeoScenic" image collection, selected "Best of BGS images" and then randomly decided on "Rocks and Minerals under the microscope." Hence the images at the head of this post which really caught my eye (among the more dramatically coloured images of igneous and metamorphic rocks under cross-polarised light).  

They are of glacial sediments, sands, silts and clays, from locations around the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. Some of them are probably lake deposits, according to the description. But what's remarkable is the exquisite detail of deformation - microscopic folds and faults formed not by tectonic processes, not by the crashing of continents and the building of mountains, but simply by the weight and movement of ice. Regardless of what forces deform materials, the results, the reaction of those materials, is governed by the laws of physics and scale is irrelevant. These images could equally well be cross-sections of the Alps or the Appalachians. And they are wondrous examples of nature's art.

One gripe that I have is that the descriptions of the images are woefully inadequate - there is minimal accompanying explanation. I suspect, since these are soft sediments, that these may be microscope images, but of peels of the sediment. And I can't tell you the exact scale of the image, which is irritating, to say the least. But at least it's a start - I doubt that, for sheer scope of information, the BGS site will ever rival the USGS, where every Professional Paper, every circular, in fact essentially everything they have ever produced, is available to download. But the OpenScience site is a great, and long-overdue, resource, well-worth exploration.

 

[Images credit the British Geological Survey; image references  P576938,  P576937, P576935]

Genesis of a geophysical icon - and a clarification for the Royal Society

 

A while ago, during our virtual conversation on the forum at About.com:Geology, Andrew Alden commented that it must have been interesting to be a student at Cambridge in the 1960s when the fundamentals of plate tectonic theory were being constructed and argued over. It certainly was. I started as an undergraduate in 1965, the same year that what has now come to be referred to as a "geophysical icon" was published - the Bullard, Everett and Smith reconstruction of the circum-Atlantic continents. The paper "gave rise to new ideas and set new approaches in motion, whose consequences are still being worked out today. The paper has been cited over one thousand times in refereed journals, and after over forty years is still cited about ten times per year." (I'll reveal the source of the quote shortly).

Last autumn, I was delighted to find that the Royal Society here in London (where else?) had set up, to celebrate the society's 350th anniversary this year, a website they call "Trailblazing - three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing." As the site describes, "Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010." It's very well-structured around a timeline with significant scientific events and links to the sixty classic articles, all of which can be downloaded entirely for free. I was pleased to find, from 1676, a letter from the great Dutch inventor of microscopes and observer of all things minute (including sand - as I described in the book) - Anthony van Leewenhoek; the paper is titled

Observations, Communicated to the Publisher by Mr. Antony van Leewenhoeck, in a Dutch Letter of the 9th of Octob. 1676. Here English'd: concerning Little Animals by Him Observed in Rain-Well-Sea. and Snow Water; as Also in Water Wherein Pepper Had Lain Infused

or, as it appeared in the original - don't you just love the verb "to English"?

 

From later centuries, you can sample observations on the transit of Venus, the discovery of a comet by the first recognised female scientist, the invention of the Davy safety lamp, Maxwell's synthesis of the theory of electromagnetism, the proof that fingerprints are unique, the development of penicillin - and much, much more. But I was particularly delighted to find that there, in 1965, was the "geophysical icon" - the Bullard, Everett and Smith reconstruction. But my delight was tempered when I read the information provided on the paper that included the statement "In 1965, Sir Edward Bullard presented his paper on The Fit of the Continents around the Atlantic to a Symposium at the Royal Society." True, Sir Edward did present the paper but to describe it as "his paper" is a bit much.

You see, I happen to know very well the "Smith" and will readily describe him as one of the great influences on my life as a geologist: Alan Gilbert Smith was my thesis supervisor at Cambridge, but he was much more than that - he was a mentor (and intellectual tormentor), and an inspiration, and he remains a great friend. He retired, officially, a couple of years ago but continues to work indefatigably - here's a picture of him taken not long ago near the geology department by Richard and Jackie Fortey:

 

But back to my point - the iconic image of the circum-Atlantic continents is routinely referred to as "the Bullard fit" - yes, Bullard started the ball rolling, but it wasn't his fit, it was Everett and Smith's. Alan is a very mild-mannered, modest, and unassuming character, but he and Jim Everett published, a couple of years ago, a fascinating account of the story and the work behind the icon - "Genesis of a Geophysical Icon." It's from their introduction that the quotation above comes, and here's part of their summary:

The final result is sometimes referred to as ‘The Bullard fit’ - a term that Bullard himself used in a popular article about the work in the Scientific American (Bullard 1969). It should be clear from the foregoing account that Bullard had the initial idea for a quantitative fit, but the methodology and its execution were the work of the authors of this paper.

Not a dogmatic or argumentative statement, simply a setting-straight for the record - which is what I'm doing here for the Royal Society.

Their paper is a fascinating account of the historical context (the debate between the "fixists" and the "drifters," spurred on by the fixist pronouncements of the physicist Sir Harold Jeffreys and the pioneering early continental fits of Warren Carey), the intellectual environment at the Cambridge Department of Geodesy and Geophysics (where it all happened, headed by Bullard), the cast of characters, and the detailed work of Everett and Smith. It also contains a description of Alan Smith's path to participation in the reconstruction - and the revolution:

Alan Smith had graduated from Cambridge in physics and geology and went to Princeton for graduate work, where Harry Hess (1906 - 1969) was beginning to put together his ideas on ocean-floor spreading. Though fascinated by Hess’s ideas, he was unconvinced of their correctness, and also of Carey’s exposition of oroclines and sphenochasms - which Carey presented at a graduate seminar in Princeton. Smith was also heavily influenced by Jeffreys, who had presented the apparently irrefutable arguments outlined above, that the forces needed to move continents around were much larger than any that had so far been proposed. While completing his PhD, Smith was fortunate to have been employed as a research associate by Bill Bonini at Princeton, during which time he learned computer programming. He joined the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics as a research assistant at the end of 1963 on a project whose aim was to date the rocks on the conjugate margins of South America and Africa, thereby placing some time constraints on the break-up of the two continents. But on learning of Everett’s work, Smith became involved with him in applying his method to the North Atlantic continents, providing much-needed geological expertise. He became the third member of a trio of geophysicists, highly sceptical about continental drift but deeply involved in ‘fitting continents together’.

"Everett's work" refers to the extraordinary computer programming skills of Jim Everett, who single-handedly invented the methodology; he manually digitised the continental margins at a range of depth contours (to test various positions for the true edge of the continental crust), and essentially re-invented Euler's fixed-point theorem of spherical geometry, of which he seems to have been blissfully unaware. Everett had been set on his way, as Bullard's PhD student, by Sir Edward simply demanding to know how good the fit - and the misfit - might be. Alan Smith provided the "geological expertise" and the rest, as they say, is history - or iconography.

But it took the radical cross-disciplinary insights of the "heroes" of plate tectonic theory before the whole thing came so elegantly and so compellingly together - something that we take for granted today, however much we continue to refine and develop it. As Everett and Smith write:

At the time of our circum-Atlantic reconstructions, the dominant opinion about continental drift was changing from dismissive to agnostic. Like most other earth scientists of the time, we had found Vine and Matthews’s (Vine and Matthews 1963) evidence of ocean-floor spreading baffling. We realised that the continents probably had fitted together at some time in the past, but many of us mentally assigned their break-up to a very early period in the evolution of the Earth. When the evidence from the distribution and nature of seismic activity, coupled with the ocean-floor spreading, gave rise to plate tectonics (e.g. Isacks et al. 1968; McKenzie and Parker 1967; Morgan 1968) then the significance of these best-fit computations became abundantly clear.

Alan Smith continues to contribute very actively (to say the least) today - see the photo below - in fieldwork, in tectonics, in paleoreconstructions - and, very enthusiastically but questioningly, in stratigraphy.

 

It is an honour to know Alan - as a friend as well as a mentor. But he has always asked the damndest questions and always with a characteristic quizzical smile. However, I learned long ago that trying to answer his questions more often than not leads to an entirely different - and better - way of looking at things. This last summer he spent some time with us in France. We spent a great few days rooting around the volcanoes and geomorphology of the Puy de Dome region retracing the footsteps of early nineteenth century geology - but that's for another post. I had also taken him to some of my favourite outcrops in the mountains of the Corbières, the frontal thrusts of the Pyrenees. The geology, as you can see, is spectacular - and here's Alan, I suspect asking one of his damn questions.

 

[The Royal Society paper is freely available at http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/258/1088/41. Unfortunately, the Everett and Smith paper is not easily available. It was published in the journal Earth Sciences History (2008, vol 27, no.1, pp1-11); if anyone is keen to see it (and it is a fascinating read) just e-mail me and I'll send the PDF).
 

"Writing in the Sand" - the Brits at the beach

 

Historically, the Brits have "done the beach" in a quintessentially idiosyncratic and eccentric way. Socks with sandals. A handkerchief knotted at each corner and worn on the head. Flasks of tea. Diverse contraptions to combat the weather (which is, after all, some excuse for eccentricity). Punch and Judy shows. Donkeys. Burying members of your family in the sand. Cunning inventions to allow, with considerable contortions, changing on the beach. And huts - the rows of gaudily painted but weather-beaten, salt-water-saturated wooden boxes with roofs, rentable for the summer holiday and now, at least in the most desirable spots, purchasable at some considerable cost. The seaside. Oh, and the saucy postcards, the most famous exponent of which was Donald McGill around the 1930s; the genre routinely featured large ladies.

It is, of course partly the weather, but the Brits have always also had a reluctance to disrobe at the beach. This postcard shows apparently bright blue skies and a balmy beach scene - but notice that the majority of people are fully clothed, at least one apparently wearing a tie. This is, I fear, not unusual - at least in the not-too-distant past. Note also the huts in this scene.  

 

I have just come into possession of a book of photographs of the British seaside, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, and it is an extraordinarily affectionate work documenting a social environment that is all too easy to mock. You laugh with the subjects, not at them. The cover of Writing in the Sand is at the head of this post; it's by a Finnish photographer, Sirrka-Liisa Konttinen, who has lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the northeast coast of England since the late 1960s. The image below is of where many of the photographs were taken, Whitley (pronounced "wittly") Bay, once a popular holiday destination, now rather past its prime. Wikipedia declares that it "boasts a fine stretch of beach of golden sand" but that it is "now widely seen as a dormitory town for Newcastle." 

 

Now oddly, I have a connection with Whitley Bay which is another reason for my delight with this volume, although the photographs are several decades on from my own times there. I had a second cousin - probably still have, but we have lost touch - named Delny, and, as a very young lad my family would holiday at Whitley Bay with her and her family. I remember her fondly. The photograph below is, I believe, of yours truly at Whitley Bay, sporting some dashing swim-wear on the golden sands.

For the rest, I will simply reproduce some of Konttinen's images since they speak for themselves - there are some stunning photographs of sand, but the majority are evocative studies of people. All are clearly copyright of the photographer, but I hope that she will forgive me for using them to bring her work, I hope, to more people's attention. My favourite image I save for the last.

 
 

Two museums and the Fontainebleau glass sand

 

A few weeks ago, the art museum in Montpellier provided a welcome refuge from torrential rain (of course, I was planning on visiting anyway, but the weather drove me there). On the whole, I have to admit that the museum's collections were dominated by the kinds of genres and schools that I find difficult to get excited by, but there were some gems. Along one long hallway hung a series of landscapes, and, among them, I found the painting above. It's by the nineteenth century French artist Jules Laurens, not well-known outside his own country, and best-known there for his orientalist works. This one, however, I found interesting. Painted in 1869, the title is Le Sentier des sables à Fontainebleau - "The sand path at Fontainebleau." Storm clouds gather as a windblown figure is followed by his dog through what would seem to be a beach surrounded by massive craggy boulders and cliffs. It is, in a way, a beach, but one from 35 million years ago being recycled today by weathering and erosion, and it's a long way from the coast - the forest of Fontainebleau lies not far southeast of Paris.

The crags and boulders (which today provide a highly-regarded destination for rock-climbers) are made of the Fontainebleau glass sand, one of the highest quality and most renowned sources of silica sand in the world. I wrote about this in the section on glass in the book:

A visitor to Fontainebleau (where Napoleon abdicated—twice) might be drawn there by the magnificence of its château, but other treasures lie in its forest. Around thirty-five million years ago, a warm sea inundated much of northwestern Europe, and this sea retreated and returned over and over again. To the southeast, the Alps were still forming, rising from the forces of Africa crushing into old Europe. As from time immemorial, while the mountains rose, the elements chastised them for doing so, eating into the newly exposed rocks, eroding and destroying them. ..... debris from the Alps was carried northwestward by rivers to the encroaching sea, along the way grinding and sorting the sand that would be disgorged into the sea at the river’s end. This sand was then caught up in the dynamic coastal processes we saw in chapter 5, all the time being cleaned and winnowed. As the sea made its final retreat, these sands were left stranded, and they are preserved today as the Fontainebleau sandstone. The rivers and the sea had done a fine job of cleaning the sand, but water later percolating through it leached out even more of the impurities, leaving huge tracts of sand that can be over 30 meters (100 ft) thick, fine, white, clean, and all of roughly the same-sized grains—in other words, ideal for making glass. Fontainebleau has long been one of the premier glass sands in the world and today is a focus of major international glassmaking companies.

Indeed, Corning Opthalmic Glass operate a major research and production facility there, on the site where, in 1752, the Bagneaux glassworks were founded by Royal Decree. Common glass, even the colourless kind, still retains a greenish tint, particularly if looked at edge-on; this results from remaining trace quantities of iron. Fontainebleau sand starts off with a very low iron content, and so is an excellent raw material for manufacturing high-quality, specialist, glass products.

A few years ago, elsewhere in France, I visited a glass-blower's workshop and asked him what the source of his sand was. "Fontainebleau, of course" was the reply; I told him of my interest in his raw material and he very kindly provided me with a substantial bag of the sand, and a glass globule made from it. Look down the microscope and you can see the purity of it (and some rounded, frosted, grains - evidence of coastal winds 35 million years ago):

 

The famed Murano glass-makers of Venice long ago abandoned their own traditional supplies that cascaded out of their side of the Alps and today use Fontainebleau sand.

 

And, when I.M. Pei was laying down the law for the specifications of his glass pyramid design for the Louvre, those criteria (together with the traditional French insistence on things French) led inevitably to using Fontainebleau sand. The story of how the sheets of glass could only be made using long-abandoned technology (and, even then, had to be finished in the U.K.) is an interesting one and the whole project has been the subject of a brutally frank - and therefore highly entertaining - Harvard Design School case study.

So, two museums, one with a painting of the raw material, the other with a spectacular example of the product. 

[Louvre pyramid image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunstarrr/2118508871/; the Murano image is from http://casasadobes.wordpress.com/]

Geology meets archaeology: ancient Mediterranean harbours

 

Sediments around the planet continue their activities, paying no respect to our definitions of time or discipline. What we see today along our coasts is but an instantaneous legacy of yesterday and the prelude for tomorrow. Despite this natural continuity, there has long been something of a gap between our self-imposed perspectives on geology and archaeology. Thankfully, rationally, and fascinatingly, this gap is now closing, and this is well illustrated by a feature article in the current issue of Geology Today. "Coastal and ancient harbour archaeology" is written by workers at the French Universities of Aix-Marseille and Lyon (see the reference below), and it makes for stimulating reading. The abstract is as follows:

What roles have human impacts and natural processes had in shaping the evolution of Mediterranean coastlines during the Holocene? Where, when and how did societies transform the coastal zone? At what scales and rhythms did these changes take place? What can ancient harbour sediments tell us about human-environment interactions? During the past 20 years, geoarchaeological research in the Mediterranean has attempted to understand the interplay between culture and nature, and more particularly how environments and processes have played a role in Holocene human occupation of the coastal zone. This approach has drawn on the multidisciplinary study of sediments, as archives of information, to attempt to differentiate between anthropogenic and natural factors, the latter, we argue, having played an increasingly secondary role with time. Three important spatial scales of analysis have emerged, local, regional and Mediterranean, all of which are outlined here.

The Mediterranean is one of the "cradles of civilisation" and, being a geologically dynamic region, the interplay between history, culture, and geology is deep and complex. As the ice receded and sea levels rose after the end of the last glaciation, valleys were inundated, estuaries formed, and a ruggedly shaped coastline resulted. But then, around 6,000 years ago, as the rate of sea level rise diminished, erosion and sediment supply took over. Estuaries filled in, river deltas built out, and complexes of lagoons and sand bars came to dominate much of the extending (prograding) coasts. This was an ideal setting for a cradle of civilisation, forming the arena for cultural development from the Bronze Age, 5,000 years or so ago, to the present day. Settlement and trade required harbours, many of which could be developed from natural features, some of which were the sites of innovative and monumental construction. Some of these harbours survive to the present day, many suffered destruction at the hands of man, or, more commonly, nature. The sedimentary record in these ancient harbours tells these stories.

As the article states,

 ...the study of sedimentary archives has grown into a flourishing branch of archaeological enquiry. It has effectively been demonstrated that ancient harbours constitute outstanding archives of both the cultural and environmental pasts. Their sediments are particularly rich in research objects bioindicators, macrorests [plant and pollen remains], artefacts, etc.), a multiplicity that accrues not only insights into the history of human occupation at a given site, but also into the mobility of its coastlines, in addition to the natural processes and hazards having impacted these waterfront areas.

The Mediterranean is littered with examples of harbours abandoned as a result of being filled with sand and silt, in turn a consequence of their disruption of natural sediment budgets (of course, we haven't learned much - manipulation and busting of these budgets remains a critical coastal problem today around the world). The Geology Today article refers to work in Cyprus where the growth of a river delta over the last 5,000 years caused the relocation of a harbour four times - twice during the Bronze Age, once in Graeco-Roman times and once during the Mediaeval period.

Natural processes exploit our attempts to exploit them, and this is dramatically the case with harbours built entirely artificially - in places where no natural facility is available. As the authors of the article remark, "In effect, the overriding problem posed by artificially protected harbours was the impact of acute sediment accumulation." The great Phoenician city of Tyre, in today's Lebanon, was developed around a small island just offshore, with two harbours to the north and south. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered the city and built a causeway between the island and the mainland; this profoundly disrupted sediment budgets, causing the coastal sands to build out and eventually themselves permanently join the island to the mainland. The harbours were ruined. The Geology Today article uses work on the geoarchaeology of Tyre to illustrate just how informative this approach can be. The illustration below is from the article. It shows the details of 9 metre core taken in the old harbour sediments that today lie below the city centre. Naturally, the oldest sediments are at the bottom and date from more than 8,000 years ago - sea level was still rising. By around 6,000 years ago, coarse beach sands were deposited, foolwed by fine sands as the harbour construction took place. The youngest sands are coarse-grained, the environment reverting to coastal beaches as the port was "semi-abandoned."

 

The "ostracod assemblages" illustrated are extremely helpful in terms both of dating and as environmental indicators. Ostracods are microscopic crustacea, and the circles on the diagram show their frequency of occurrence (the log scale at the bottom) and the colours show the proportions of ostracods from different environments as they vary with time and position in the core. The period of the port's heyday is characterised by "marine lagoonal" ostracods - quiet waters but marine, as you would expect in a protected harbour.  

I followed up on one of the references in the paper, work by a group of researchers at McMaster University in Canada, in collaboration with the the University of Haifa (see reference below). The title of the paper intrigued me: "The tsunami of 13 December A.D. 115 and the destruction of Herod the Great's harbor at Caesarea Maritima, Israel." Caesarea Maritima was a great city and Harbour built by Herod the Great, starting around 25 BC. The image below (from the useful site describing work by the University of Victoria shows what now remains of the gigantic construction, together with, below the waves, the outlines of its original extent.

This was an extravagant construction for an extravagant city; it was the largest artificial harbour ever built at that point, and used Roman engineering - the basis of the construction was a series of caissons, made from concrete (ah yes, Roman concrete, Italian volcanic ash - another blog post...) and sunk to the sea bed. The painting at the top of this post (from the National Geographic and this site from Cornell University) shows what the port may have looked like in its glory days. But its glory days were not to last; Talmudic sources record a tsunami on the 13th December A.D. 115 that struck Caesarea, following an earhtquake that destroyed Antioch and probably originated in the subduction zone of the Cyprian arc to the west.

The paper describes underwater geoarchaeological investigations in the old harbour of Caesarea Maritima that have shown dramatic evidence in the sediments that support the idea that the port was destroyed by a tsunami. Excavating trenches revealed older sands scoured and eroded by an extraordinary overlying deposit of shells and shell fragments, pebbles, coarse sand, and pottery; the layer shows reverse-grading - the coarsest fragments at the top, typical of deposition from the sudden cessation of a high energy flow. The top of the layer is filled with clam shells deposited convex-side upwards - again a hydrodynamic indication of strong one-way flow. The authors argue - very convincingly - that this is a tsunami deposit, and the dating that has been possible is consistent with the A.D. 115 event. They included an illustration of the sequence of events:

 

The tsunami deposit is followed by a layer of sand filling in the sea bed after the disaster, and then the port clearly came back into use for a while, leaving behind a deposit of ship ballast and pottery overlain, in turn by a millennium or so of storm sands.

I wrote a post last year on tsunami sand forensics - it's fascinating to see the application to dramatic events in the tumultuous history of the Mediterranean, and to see geology and archaeology collaborating.  

[The following is the reference for the Geology Today article:

Coastal and ancient harbour geoarchaeology

N. Marriner ¹ , C. Morhange ¹ & J.P. Goiran ²

¹ CNRS CEREGE UMR 6635, Université Aix-Marseille, Europôle de l'Arbois, BP 80, 13545 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 04, France. [email protected] ² CNRS MOM Archéorient UMR 5133, 5/7 rue Raulin, 69365 Lyon Cedex 07, France.

Volume 26 Issue 1, Pages 21 - 2

The Caesarea Maritima work is described in the following paper in Geology:

The tsunami of 13 December A.D. 115 and the destruction of Herod the Great's harbor at Caesarea Maritima, Israel
Eduard G. Reinhardt, Beverly N. Goodman, Joe I. Boyce, Gloria Lopez, Peter van Hengstum, W. Jack Rink, Yossi Mart and Avner Raban

Geology 2006;34;1061-1064]

"Sand" at About.com:Geology

The tour has moved on to Andrew Alden at About.com where he has posted a very much appreciated review, and we are in the midst of an ongoing conversation on his forum - Andrew has posed a series of different, challenging, and, at least for me in trying to answer them, entertaining questions.

Architecture, Mont Blanc, and, eventually, sand

 

One of the great enjoyments of rambling around the blogosphere is the discovery of new stories and connections and simply the journey you take in the process. I was fascinated by Geoff Manaugh's recent post on BLDG BLG on an artificial island in Montenegro's Bay of Kotor whose construction began in the 15th century. The island was built of rocks thrown into the bay as a foundation for a chapel, and the tradition continues today:

Throwing stones into the bay and, in the process, incrementally expanding the island's surface area, has apparently become a local religious tradition: "The custom of throwing rocks into the sea is alive even nowadays. Every year on the sunset of July 22, an event called fašinada, when local residents take their boats and throw rocks into the sea, widening the surface of the island, takes place.

It seems that Manaugh happened upon this by chance ("Somehow this morning I ended reading about an artificial island and devotional chapel...") and his comments set me off on my own serendipitous journey. Towards the end of the post was the following comment:

In fact, it doesn't seem inaccurate to view this as a vernacular version of Vicente Guallart's interest in architecturally constructing new hills and coastlines based on a logical study of the geometry of rocks.

This idea intrigued me and I followed the link to Barcelona architect Vicente Guallart's site; I looked at the project titled "Howtomakeamountain" and found myself somewhat bemused, as is often the case when I try to penetrate the prose of creative design and architecture. The project addresses "The re-generation of Denia’s Castle hill," Denia being a town in the Costa Blanca overlooked by an 11th century castle. Part of the project description reads as follows:

The limestone of the hill and its rhombohedric crystals of calcite enabled us to conceive, at multiple scales, a crystalline genesis for the project. A coherent system, from the structure itself to its outer limit, that responds to a single system of crystallization.
In this way, the skin, like soil in the hills, directly reflects the internal logic of the mass and its interaction with the environment.
In this case, the rhombohedric system generates a hexagonal geometry that will be the geometric base of the ‘gene’ (a hexagonal micro-topography that can be combined all over its faces) that will initiate the process of constructing the skin. This gene will set in motion the re-generation of the hill.

Bemused? However, I was interested in the illustrations, amongst which were several superb and meticulously observed pen and ink or pencil drawings of what would seem to be Alpine and glacial geology, for example:

 

Associated with these were various illustrations that appeared to show a geometric analysis of the mountain form and architecture (and a clear reference to Guallart's "rhombohedric system"):

 

Finally, I could see the source of these illustrations: "Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Le Massif du Mont-Blanc." Now this came as something of a shock - I had come across the work of Viollet-le-Duc on several occasions, but never as an observer of glacial geology and mountain structure. He was a 19th century French architect, best known for his exuberant and imaginative restorations of ancient buildings, amongst them Mont-Saint-Michel and the medieval fortress city of Carcassone.

I say "imaginative" for Viollet-le-Duc's "restorations" were, and continue to be highly controversial - more often than not, the results bore little resemblance to the original; he wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."  This is certainly true of Carcassonne:

 

But le-Duc was a highly respected practitioner of both architectural reality and theory, considered to be one of the fathers of modern architecture and a known inspiration for Gaudi. But Mont Blanc and geology? I continued my quest and discovered that in 1876, towards the end of his life, he published the results of his time spent observing, documenting, and drawing the Mont Blanc massif. The entire text and illustrations are, miraculously, available online (in French) at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5400922n.image.langFR.f6.vignettesnaviguer. I've only begun to look at this work, but as a contemporary of Ruskin and an example of the fascination of the times with mountains and the concept of "the sublime" (so superbly described in Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind), le-Duc's observations are fascinating. I thought back to my own travels around the Mont-Blanc region a couple of years ago, and looked at my own photographs through the spectacles of le-Duc's geometrical "deconstruction."

 

And it would seem that le-Duc's observations of glaciers are today of value in reconstructing glacial retreat in the Alps - his work endures in many ways!

Continuing my journey, I then discovered a "novelette" that le-Duc had written shortly before his death. Histoire d’un dessinateur (literally, story of a drawer - in the artistic sense) is the tale of a young lad, the son of a gardener, taken under the wing of his father's employer, an artist whose own son has none of the talents of the gardener's boy. The story is summarised at http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=107 where I came upon the following description and illustration:

The book then follows his pilgrimage through geometry, trigonometry, botany, anatomy, zoology, perspective, etc.  Much of this is an admirably clear account of these disciplines and their practical application, substantially illustrated with careful and detailed diagrams and drawings, such as the one in which we see little Jean tracing the contour lines of a sandheap while M. Majorin sternly watches him, measuring rod in hand.

 

Ah, the joys of serendipitous discoveries, journeys, and connections!

Book tour - and a different kind of conversation

The book tour continues, this time at David Williams' Stories in Stone blog. Through the Sandglass participated in David's ground-breaking tour last year to celebrate his terrific book and now it's a great pleasure to reverse the roles. David starts off with his review today and then tomorrow a Q&A that's a slightly different kind of conversation, one that emphasises sand in our imaginations and more literary topics - David's questions were quite a challenge, but I thoroughly enjoyed thinking about them.

The John Burroughs Medal

I find myself in an unusual state - lost for words.

I have just heard that Sand has been awarded the 2010 John Burroughs Medal. 

Next stop on the tour

Callan Bentley's students fired off a whole bunch of interesting questions, most of which I attempted to answer - check out NOVA Geoblog today.