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Friday 23 August 2024

Signs in the cliffs



We’ve just arrive back from our summer holiday after a tedious journey up the M5, but now we're relaxing with coffee and dark chocolate. One day we went on a local geology tour organised by Sidmouth museum. It’s a subject Mrs H and I know nothing about so we knew it was likely to be an interesting couple of hours, which it was.

By the end of the tour, one impression stood out, apart from interesting details of the local geology and that was how little we’d noticed about obvious features of local cliffs.

 



Arrowed in the photo is an example of something we hadn’t noticed before even though we've walked past it many times. It’s a large oval shape in the rock with what looks like an attached tube shape going upwards to the right. It is thought that it may be the fossilised burrow of some long extinct animal.

 You may also notice the initials of morons carved into the rock.

6 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Millions of years from now, geologists will be pondering the fossilised remains of M.I.s, or "moronic initials".

"What could possibly have caused them? Only homo sapiens seems to have had the opposable thumbs required for such an artefact, but their utter pointlessness and vacuity seems to disprove that hypothesis..."

A K Haart said...

Sam - good point, it's something geologists should consider, as potentially, these carved initials are deep fake geology of the future.

Scrobs. said...

The first impression I had was that it was a closeup of Jabba the Hutt...

A K Haart said...

Scrobs - much older than we thought though.

Anonymous said...

Quite a few years ago, on a similar study tour, the guide asked if we had noticed that, where part of the cliffs had sunk, the slope always appears to be about 30 degrees (somewhat was pointed out during a tour around The Big Put in Wales). Strange.
Penseivat

A K Haart said...

Penseivat - yes, it seems to reach a point where the slope is stable. It sounds like an issue similar to mounds of sand or aggregate in quarries which are only stable at a certain slope angle so they must take up a certain base area.