Abstract
THE insular position of Britain, which we are accustomed to regard as an essential and aboriginal feature of the country, is merely accidental, and has not always been maintained. The intimate relation of Britain with the Continent is well shown by the Admiralty charts. If the west of Europe were elevated 200ft.—that is, the height of the London Monument—the Straits of Dover, half of the North Sea, and a large part of the English Channel would be turned into dry land. If the elevation extended to 600ft.—that is, merely the united heights of St. Paul's and the Monument—the whole of the North Sea, the Baltic, and the English Channel would become land. There would likewise be added to the European area a belt of territory from loo to 150 miles broad, stretching to the west of Ireland and Scotland. A vast plain would unite Britain to Denmark, Holland, and Belgium, and would present two platforms, of which the more southerly would stretch from what are now the Straits of Dover northward to the northern edge of the Dogger Bank. The steep declivity separating the two plateaux is doubtless a prolongation of the Jurassic and Cretaceous escarpments of Yorkshire. It is trenched at either end by marked depressions, of which the western is a magnificent valley through which the united waters of the Rhine and Thames would flow between the Dogger Bank and the Yorkshire cliffs. The eastern gap would allow the combined Elbe and Weser to escape into the northern plain. Possibly all those rivers would unite on that plain, but, in any case, they would fall into a noble fjord which would then be revealed following the southern coast line of Norway. Altogether an area more than thrice that of Britain would be added to Europe. By a total rise of 1,800 feet, Britain would be united to the Faroe Islands and Iceland; while the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans would be separated. From its position on the oceanic border of a continent, Britain has been exposed to a great variety of geological change. In such a position marine erosion and deposit are most active, and a slight upheaval or depression, which would have no sensible effect in the interior of a continent, makes all the difference between land and water. Moreover, there appears to be a tendency to special disturbance along the edge of an ocean. America affords the most marked proofs of this tendency, but in the structure of Scandinavia and its prolongation into Scotland and Ireland there appear to be traces of similar ancient ridging up of the oceanic border of Europe.
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The Origin of the Scenery of the British Islands 1 . Nature 29, 325 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/029325a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029325a0