Non-Fiction Reviews
This Volcanic Isles
The violent processes that forged the British landscape
(2024) Robert Muir-Wood, Oxford University Press, £14.99, hrdbk, xv + 338pp, ISBN 978-0-198-8762-0
Travelling, be it by car or rail, we do tend to take the landscape for granted. This is not to say that we do not appreciate it, or even enjoy it, but how often do we contemplate the forces acting, over a long time – many millions of years – or even far away, be it the middle of the Atlantic or the north of Africa, that were crucial to shaping our landscape?
Now, while I am a Fellow of the Geological Society, I am in one sense a bit of a cheat. I come to geology through biology and the environmental sciences with an interest in Earth system science: I am not a proper geologist comfortable with a hammer, identifying different minerals and strata. In short, I come to Robert Muir-Wood's book as someone with an interest in aspects of science adjacent to, and overlapping only with just a part of the geoscience realm. As such, I am possibly like many of you and do not have an in-depth knowledge of the geological processes that have shaped Britain's landscape (perhaps a little undergraduate geomorphology excepted). Here Robert Muir-Wood has provided a fascinating, whistle-stop tour of Britain's geological history and indentifying how some of our nation's iconic landscapes came to be.
Robert Muir-Wood's story largely follows the events of the Cenozoic era: the past 66 million years since the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. Having said that, he does take a look at the Upper Cretaceous 100 million years ago (mya) to 66 mya. For much of this time, what was Britain other than the Scottish Highlands was in fact a scattering of islands a bit like the Bahamas in a clear warm sea, far from any major continent off of which there would have been eroding landmass. And so the chalk was laid down in clear seas in the Upper (Late) Cretaceous, 100-66mya, to give us the white chalk cliffs of Dover, parts of the Isle of Wight and the Chiltern hills. It is places like this the chalk has survived but (other than the Scottish highlands) much of Britain must have been covered in chalk some of which has been lost due to erosion.
Then around the time of the dinosaur extinction 66 mya Britain was host to a number of volcanoes. Some were huge. The one that had been situated at what is today the Isle of Rum in Scotland is estimated to have been three kilometres high! There was even a large volcano in the most western part of the Bristol Channel.
The British landscape was also affected by events far away. Some time, millions of years, after the dinosaur extinction, at around 52 mya, the African plate (which contained what is today Spain) collided with the Eurasian plate. This formed the Alps and Pyrenees and the 'ripples' from this collision shaped the Weald and Wessex basins the 'Little Pyrenees' fold and thrust belt.
There are many gems to mine in This Volcanic Isle. One of my personal favourites stems from my interest is an episode 56 mya, the Initial Eocene Thermal Maximum or Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (as youngster geoscientists tell me we must call it these days) just a couple of hundred thousand years long (almost a blip in geological timescales) in which volcanic activity in the embryonic mid-North Atlantic injected carbon dioxide into the atmosphere raising global temperatures. Such a high global temperature combined with acidic seas allowed the formation of what would become sarsen rock, and it is this rock that was used to create part of Stonehenge.
Another, is the formation of the Thames Valley terraces over the course of the past couple of million years with the rise and fall of sea levels and land uplift. During the 1970s I went to school, and had my gap year with college, in Reading and I was used to cycling up and down and along these terraces. (The trick was to cycle along them as much as your route would allow without having to cycle between them.) Such sea level change, as well as vertical movement of the land, also resulted in raised beaches, my personal favourite being at Bembridge in the Isle of Wight.
Yet another is the view I enjoyed from Anglesey towards Snowdon. Anglesey is comparatively low and flat, yet just a few miles away there is a wall of rock with Snowdon and associated mountains. There is a fault between Snowdonia and Anglesey and the pressure between the two had to be relieved: something had to give and so Snowdonia was uplifted. The view from Anglesey to Snowdonia was one I took pleasure in while on a post-grad field trip in the early 1980s, and there is a photograph of a similar panorama in This Volcanic Isle.
You will have your own favourites and a reasonably extensive subject index at the back of the book will enable you to look up key locations. So this book is not only a good straight read, it can be a reference work if you are planning to visit anywhere in Britain so you can get ahead of the game and appreciate the landscape. The book also explores some historic geologists and their early works that laid the foundations for our modern geoscience understanding.
Other than those with an interest in science yet not steeped in geology per se, this is one of those books that might be useful to those who have just taken A-level geology and are about to embark on a geoscience or related (geography, environmental science) degree. They will find the academic references at the book's rear of use in starting a deeper dive into some of the topics. (Here, school pupils who are prospective university students can learn how to use Google Scholar.) For everyone else, this is written at the proverbial New Scientist magazine level and so will be accessible to many with a more casual interest in science, and, of course, it will also appeal to amateur geologists.
The book ends with a hypothetical question and a scenario just set a decade in the future: could Britain see the birth of a new volcano? This, as the author himself points out, is unlikely, but not impossible.
Britain is a fascinating country with a rich human history going back thousands of years of which modern Americans might be envious. There is its landscape ecology, modern society, multiculturalism and much else to enjoy. But don't forget its geology which provides the foundation for it all. Here, Robert Muir-Wood, provides an intriguing introduction. No geological hammer required.
Jonathan Cowie
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