'The
Map That Changed the World': Sedimental Journeys
extract from bookreview in the New York Times by Malcolm C.
McKenna, August 5, 2001
William Smith (1769-1839) was a
surveyor, a largely self-taught land drainer and a superintendent for a
company building canals to barge coal cheaply to rapidly growing
English cities as the Industrial Revolution took hold. His interests
and occupation made it possible for him, almost single-handedly, to
change the way the English-speaking population of the world looked at
the pile of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers that embalm much of
Earth's history.
''Strata'' Smith was Britain's first great field stratigrapher and
stratigraphic paleontologist. After more than 20 years of work and many
reverses, he produced the first geological map of the British isles, an
enormous and beautiful affair titled ''A Delineation of the Strata of
England and Wales With Part of Scotland.'' It consisted of 15 sheets,
published over several years but with a printed date of 1815, on a
scale of five miles to the inch. When put together on a wall, the map
is 8 1/2 feet high and 6 feet across. On it stretch long bands of
color, depicting the surface outcrops and subsoil extension of a stack
of 23 major sedimentary rock units, whose sequence Smith had determined
by dint of ceaseless travel and at ruinous personal expense.
Despite its considerable price when it was finally published, Smith's
colored map sold about 400 copies. That wide dissemination, and the
fact that he compiled the information in it from original observations,
changed the way his countrymen looked at their land and the mineral
wealth that underpinned it. Smith added a third dimension to scenery,
and he demonstrated the utility of fossils for opening up the history
and development of the planet. For him the earth was transparent.
6:03:59 AM 
|
|
