The little village of Santon Downham, on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in East Anglia, is today a pleasant, if not particularly remarkable, example of bucolic English hamlets. But it has one extraordinary claim to fame: in the middle...
So declared Dennis Dare, a Manager of Ocean City, Maryland, after the conspiracy of a nor'easter and the remnant of tropical storm Ida wrought havoc along the coasts of the northeastern US over the last few days. His concern was...
Nina must cook some pasta for 15 minutes. The only way she has of measuring time is a 7-minute sand-timer and an 11-minute sand-timer. How can she use these timers to measure exactly 15 minutes? I just came across a...
The Nima Sand Museum on the coast of Japan's main island of Honshu contains the world's largest sandglass. Six meters in height, it is ceremonially turned at midnight on December 31st every year - and takes until exactly a year...
It just won't stop cropping up. After I returned from giving the talk in Manchester, checking through the news in the world of science, not only did I come across impressive progress in coastal research (my number 6 unknown ),...
My daughter and her grandfather, both in Philadelphia, will probably, to put it mildly, have less than kind words for me when they see this post. For the Phillies (last year's champions) were beaten in the baseball World Series last...
It rose out of the omnipresent sand of a natural island, and there remains a thin layer of the ocher substance almost everywhere: on the canopied grandstands, on the brilliantly lighted hotel at the edge of the track, on the...
In my talk earlier this week, Ten Things We Don't Know About Sand, number 6 was "How coasts work." Now of course we know the basics, but coastal systems are so complex and dynamic that the details elude us. I...
My daughter is a great fan of The Simpsons (recently celebrating their 20th anniversary), and enjoys challenging anyone to name any topic for which she cannot quote an episode in which that topic featured. Sometimes, I feel as if I'm...
Next monday, the 26th, I'll be giving a talk at the Manchester Science Festival (Manchester UK, that is). A year or so ago, on British TV, there was a series of programmes with titles such as "Ten things you didn't...
Candelstick Park famously survived the earthquake of October 17, 1989 for one simple reason: its foundations were firmly anchored to solid bedrock. But for large areas of central California, the advice against building a house on sand was dramatically and...
This is Earth Science Week, in the US at least. It's an idea that deserves, through globalisation or international intellectual contagion, to be celebrated worldwide. Sponsored by the American Geological Institute, and supported by a consortium of earth science organisations,...
I've just spent several days rambling around the geology of the Puy de Dome and the surrounding volcanoes in the Auvergne region of France's Massif Central. These are extraordinary and surprising landscapes - volcanicity with a long history extending up...
A few days ago, I described the fractal sand landscapes on the beach of Cap Ferret on the Atlantic coast west of Bordeaux. The swirling sand banks that shape-shift around the cape are but part of the great drama of...
The bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, in the coastal corner of France between Normandy and Brittany, boasts the fourth-largest tidal range in the world – up to 14 meters (46 feet) and the sedimentary drama to go along with it. It is...
In the previous post I cited the joys of serendipity, and they continue. Travelling down the west coast of Brittany, we were attracted to the old fishing harbour of Douanenez and Le Port-Musée there, a boat museum. This is a...
The termination of the seemingly endless stretch of beach and dunes that forms the Atlantic boundary of the Bordeaux region is Cap Ferret, a constantly changing and migrating spit of sand. This guards the entrance to the Bay of Arcachon,...
I was much looking forward to encountering Mont-Saint-Michel, not from the point of view of a pilgrim, or even a namesake, but simply to observe a sedimentary drama that is in the process of being rewritten, restaged, restored. So, on...
I'm off for a bit of an excursion, wandering, meandering, and otherwise peregrinating through Brittany and then down the Atlantic coast of France - something I've wanted to do for a while. There will therefore be some uncertainty around when...
This blog celebrates sand and its wonders, its intersections with our lives and the processes of our planet, but, let's face it, sometimes sand can be at best a nuisance and at worst the cause of major problems. As the...
