I have decided to compose a series of blogs to compliment and extend on my extended essay ‘A Simplified study of the Geology of the Humberside Region and some examples of its im[act on the reion’s Social and Economic History’ (see section three of this website).
The rocks under the surface of soil and water form the ‘crust’ of planet Earth and although their mass seems great to us in fact the crust only forms 1% of the Planet’s mass, the lower ‘mantle and ‘core’ comprise the rest.
The rocks under our feet in this part of the world have moved around as directed by the movements of the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust, as have all parts of the continental masses of the Crust, this with the gradual splitting-up of the once supercontinent of Pangaea, this before plants and land animals really evolved. Britain was on the north-eastern edge of the Laurasian land-mass – the Eurasian land-mass today.
The rocks of the Earth’s crust underlay the seas and oceans as well as the land and indeed some surface rocks today were formed in past subterranean environments.
The Humber Estuary, a recent feature on the Earth’s surface on a geological scale, essentially bisected the regions terrain, features in the terrain having previously existed for millions of years. The easiest example here to cite is that the Humber Estuary split the chalk escarpment resulting in the current names of Lincolnshire Wolds and Yorkshire Wolds. This escarpment had/has a west-facing scarp slope and an east-facing dip slope. The escarpment was formed by the tilting, by orogenic forces, of a strata of chalk rock.
The chalk rock was, in turn, created by the compression of detritus on the bed of shallow seas and lakes during the Cretaceous geological period. The picture above, taken from Wikipaedia, is an artist’s impression of life at that time, a hundred million years before the evolution of primitive man.