CRUMBLING

You might not have noticed the news story when it broke recently (well, it’s getting on for a good few weeks ago by now, given how long it takes me to get around to writing about these things), but a huge chunk of the white cliffs of Dover fell off the other day and landed as a huge pile of chalk on the stony beach below, thankfully without hurting anyone, although how they know that without shifting the stuff is anyone’s guess, I suppose.

They said it was due to the water getting in the cracks, freezing and expanding, as water does, and then causing the rock to crack open like an iceberg calving off a glacier, and with just as much of a crash, but with slightly less buoyancy, so instead of floating and bobbing off into the ocean to melt whilst frightening anyone in the shipping lanes, the fallen rock just lay there waiting to erode or perhaps be opportunistically picked up for the snooker and pub darts industries, seeing as very few of the other outlets for chalk seem to need all that much of it in these “post-blackboard” days…

There might be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover one day, but they’d better get a wriggle on, I think, if they are beginning to crumble away at that rate.

Coastal erosion will, of course, one day mean that the entire British Isles crumbles into the sea, unless there’s some kind of tectonic shift which lifts it up again, of course, and everything we know will one day be nothing but a forgotten non-memory. There is some suggestion that the entire British Isles will rotate clockwise and be pushed ever northwards by the massive geological forces at work underground, but that does rather suppose that there’s something left to shift once the wind and the waves have done their worst and all our notions of nationality and boundaries have been erased by time’s crucible.

For those of you hoping that these islands might just get shifted to warmer climes, well, it seems that’s just not going to happen, and even if it did, despite those natty little sequences that you can find on-line which show the continents moving through all of the world’s history in about ten seconds, it would have taken slightly longer than that anyway. Imagine a flight to North America that travelled at about the speed your fingernails grow and you’d still be travelling far quicker than the rocks were.

We’ve become so impatient these days, haven’t we? Geological time just isn’t fast enough for us, so we animate it up to super-speed to get it all over with in the bink of an eye,  then get disappointed by the slow reality of it, whilst still managing to be amazed when houses built a mile or so from the seashore suddenly find themselves hanging over a precipice and then falling over it, or shocked by a devastating Tsunami, as the devastating truth of what it really means still manages to catch us unawares.

Whether or not it’s the worry over the cost of the house that worries us more than the vanishing land does, I suppose, at least put a very “human” perspective on something that is both inevitable and quite terrifying, even if you’re living in a land-locked county a very long way from the sea.

Perhaps, as an old friend of mine once stated, we really ought to be “making friends with the fish” after all, because we’re very likely to be sharing the watery parts of the planet with them again one day.

It’s time, perhaps, to start thinking about resurrecting those long-forgotten gills again, unless, of course, another magma surge lifts up a whole new continent for whatever humanity becomes to stagger around upon. You see, that’s the trouble with continental drift and plate tectonics, you can never really be sure about what you’re going to end up with, only that, with certain rare exceptions, it’s all going to happen rather slowly.

But the truth is that this layout of the Earth that we’re all so familiar with and upon which we have played out so much of our human history that we tend to think of it as being fairly permanent will all vanish one day, and all of our notions of America and Europe and all the rest will be as meaningless as, perhaps, they ought to already be.

I know that it’s just geology, but when your homeland starts crumbling away so dramatically, it does kind of put a few things into perspective, and makes you wonder, perhaps, what your priorities really ought to be.