Yesterday (one of those sunny September afternoons in clear light on shimmering flat sea and no breeze), Clare and I went on a Geology tour at West Runton beach (Norfolk, twixt Sheringham and Cromer). It was led by a former curator of Cromer Museum, who was part of the group which discovered the Steppe Mammonth on this beach in the early 1990s.
He was excellent at explaining the classification of Geological time since the Big Bang. He used the location to do so
We were standing on the concrete mooring platform at West Runton. From this mooring, our guide pointed to Cromer Pier in the distance, some 2.5 miles away. His illustration went like this:
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| Cromer Pier from West Runton Beach |
Imagine, he said, a timeline where the start is Cromer Pier representing the Big Bang, the start of our Universe. Then he pointed to a half centimetre crack at the edge of the concrete mooring upon which we were standing. At some point in this crack, he said, would have occurred the latter stages of Pleistocene Epoch in the Cenozoic Era, 2.5 million – 12,000 years ago. The Holocene, our current Epoch in the Cenozoic Era, and the end of the timeline, would have been a
fag-paper’s width within this crack....
Twelve thousand years and a fag-paper's width. A momentary perspective on our sense of what's important, our place in the scheme of things
