One rock type, unusually pure and unusually porous, produces a landscape unlike anything around it - dry on top, wet underneath and covered in a grassland that only exists because…
There is a common assumption about layered rocks that slate steadily breaks.
The assumption is that a rock which splits into sheets does so along the layers in which it…
Most rock is worn away mechanically. Limestone is removed chemically, taken into solution and carried off in the water, and a landscape shaped by dissolving behaves unlike anywhere else. Here…
Coarse material behaves completely differently from sand under waves - it drains, it rolls, it stacks and it sorts - and almost everything distinctive about a shingle beach follows from…
Weathering does not attack rock evenly. It finds cracks, corners and weaknesses, and the shapes left standing are whatever it could not reach. Here are seventeen.
1. The Rock Was…
Ice does two things to a landscape: it removes material from where it flows and deposits it where it stops. Almost every feature below is one of those two, and…