The Jurassic Coast is a 153 km stretch of the English Channel coastline that is world renowned for the incredibly diverse nature of its geology – so much so that in 2001 it became only the second natural landmark in the UK to be granted protection as a World Heritage Site.

The site stretches from Orcombe Point near Exmouth all the way to to Old Harry Rocks near Swanage, and its entire length can be walked on the South West Coast Path, with some wonderful sights to see along the way.

Lulworth Cove

The coastline at Lulworth Cove is concordant, meaning that through movements in the earth’s crust layers of rock have been folded up parallel with the sea.

The entrance to the cove is through a limestone strata, that was widened through erosion by both the sea and glacial melt waters. As the entrance gradually increased in size the softer clay behind was eroded more quickly, giving rise to the spectacular cove we see today.

Just to the west is Stair Hole, which is one of the finest examples of limestone folding in the world, and which lets us see how Lulworth cove would have looked only a few hundred thousand years ago.

Durdle Door

A couple of miles further west is the spectacular limestone arch known as Durdle Door, which has featured in many music videos and several movies.

Here the limestone strata is thinner and has been more severely eroded – and where it is thinnest it has been eroded right through to form Durdle Door. Taking a more general overview of this area we can clearly see the remnants of the original course of the limestone.

Black Ven

Black Ven is one of the largest active landslips in Europe, parts of which continue to get lost to the sea, and it’s famous for the abundance of fossils that are revealed as the cliffs continue to crumble.

The fossil history here is incredibly rich – for example it was in the nearby town of Lyme Regis that the first complete Ichthyosaur fossil was discovered, and I have personally walked out onto the beach at Lyme, cracked open a rock, and found a fossil of my own.

Other history

For Geologists and Paelentologists the Jurassic coast really is a dream come true – we could go on for hours about places like Ballard Cliff, Chesil Beach and the Isle of Portland. We’ve not even touched upon human history here, like when during World War II several sections of the Jurassic Coast became property of the Ministry of War, leading to the abandonment of the village of Tyneham.

While there’s nothing quite like visiting somewhere like this in person, Wikipedia has enough about the Jurassic Coast to keep you clicking around for hours. Also, the official Jurassic Coast website has a wealth of information!

Thanks to many a BBC documentary, Laurence Madill, my high school geography teacher Mr. Woods, and several holidays of my own.

It’s Earth Day today, an event designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. To celebrate, we’re looking at the unlikely survival of a very tiny piece of nature in the heart of one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.

From directly above, it appears that there is somehow a large tree growing on the roof of the Kayashima train station in Osaka.

However when we look at the Street View of the station, we can see that only the canopy of the huge tree protrudes from the roof¹, and in fact the entire station, platform and all, have been built around the tree so as to avoid damaging it.

This is a camphor tree which the locals believe to be sacred, so they appealed to the railway company to avoid chopping it down. One of the suggestions for celebrating Earth Day is to plant a tree, and here they found a way to avoid knocking one down in the first place.

It’s just one tree, but it might serve as an example of how much better we could incorporate the natural world into our environment.

Thanks to GEarth Hacks.

Point Roberts, Washington, USA, is a small seaside community with just under 1,500 residents. It boasts a small main street, 2 gas stations, and one supermarket. What makes this village unique is that by virtue of being on a 4.9-square-mile peninsula, its only border is with Canada – and is completely isolated from the rest of the United States.

An unforeseen side-effect of the 1846 Oregon Treaty, life in this U.S. exclave moves at a much slower pace than on the mainland, but at the cost of some major conveniences. Residents of Point Roberts have to drive over an hour and through two international border crossings just to see a dentist, seek medical attention, or even go to school past the 3rd grade!

Located only 30 minutes outside of downtown Vancouver, Point Roberts is also popular with vacationing Canadians for its relatively inexpensive real estate.¹

Despite its isolation from the rest of the country, this bastion of United Statehood actually has its own border crossing (pictured above) and is the self-proclaimed “greatest gated community in the United States”. Though, if you think about it, isn’t it just like a small Alaska?²

There’s more about Point Roberts at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Keith, Didier, Deron Husak, and Peter.

Before 1980, Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur was a 3 metre deep freshwater lake, but due to a highly unusual man-made disaster, today it is a 60 m deep saltwater lake.

On the morning of November 20th, 1980, a group of Texaco Fuel Company workers drilling the lake for oil inadvertently broke through the lake bed into the upper reaches of the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine below. The water began to pour rapidly into the cavern left by the mining process, and soon the expanding sinkhole had swallowed the entire lake, the drilling platform, and 11 barges¹!

Barges being pulled into the sinkhole

The suction that this sinkhole created was so powerful that it actually managed to reverse the flow of the Delcambre canal, a 12-mile-long waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico. Once the lake itself had emptied, the inflow from this canal created a 50 m waterfall, the largest ever recorded in the state of Louisiana².

Miraculously, everyone in close proximity to the sinkhole as well as the 55 workers in the flooded mine were able to escape with their lives. 9 of the 11 barges even managed to “pop” back up to the surface once water pressure had equalised!

Though Texaco was never charged with negligence due to a complete lack of evidence³, the Diamond Salt Company still managed to walk away with $32 million in an out-of-court settlement. Needless to say, they never went back into the salt-mining business.

Thanks to Gerald Talley and Terry Foster. There’s more info on Lake Peigneur at Wikipedia.

To the east of Winnipeg lies the Red River Floodway, a 47km long channel intended to prevent disastrous flooding in Canada’s 8th largest city.

The arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere leads to flood alerts in many areas as snow melts and rivers rise. The Red River is renowned for causing flooding in the US states of North Dakota and Minnesota.

It is Winnipeg, however, that is most threatened by this river. A terrible flood in 1950 led to construction of the Floodway from 1962 to 1968. At the time it was the world’s largest earth-moving project, bigger even than the Suez Canal. Since completion it has been used more then 20 times to protect the city’s almost 700,000 residents from flooding.

Control gates south of the city divert water into the Floodway when forecasts indicate that flooding could occur. The channel and dikes can contain flood water flowing at 2,550 cubic metres per second safely around the city and back to the river at Lockport.

The 1997 flood tested the Floodway and other dikes to their limit. Construction is currently underway to expand the channel to a capacity of 4,000 cubic metres per second. This would accommodate a “1 in 700 year event” in the terminology of the Floodway Authority.

The CBC Archives have good information about the 1950 flood and the construction of the Floodway.

Other flood-prevention systems previously featured on Google Sightseeing include the Thames Barrier in England and the Delta Works in the Netherlands.

Thanks to Daryl.