Golden sands set hard

Well, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words - but sometimes you need words to tell the story of the picture. 

Take this one, for instance, which I took twenty years ago with a stupidly cheap and nasty APS camera.  I think it was my first or second post in the earlier version of this blog (hence comments from that time).

You wouldn’t know from the photo but standing in front of this quarry face was at the start of an adventure and the start of a new career.  It was my first field trip as a student, doing a science foundation course that I hoped would lead to a career as a biologist or ecologist.  Little did I know that by the end of the year I would be hooked on Earth Science and changing tack towards a geosciences degree!  

What you can’t see from the photo is that the quarry was an absolute suntrap and that after taking the said photo I promptly retreated to the shade and sat on a rocky ledge fanning myself with my notebook while I was trying to take in all I was learning that day.  You also won't see from the photo that the 'bird poo' you can just about make out in the bottom left quadrant photo is artfully faked, so we were gleefully informed, with white paint for a wildlife documentary!

Oh – and for those who are interested:  The photo shows an exposure of cross-stratified sandstone, dating back to the Cretaceous Period, in a disused quarry at the HQ of the RSPB in Sandy, Bedfordshire (England).  The interesting thing about it is that this was being deposited in a locally-shallowing sea while global sea levels were rising as a result of  temperature rises leading to 'Greenhouse Earth' conditions.

#100Photos #42