A Prescription for Awe

Heads down, we plodded along a coastal path into an almost gale-force wind that came howling straight up the English Channel, driving the rain into our faces and making it hard to steal more than an occasional glance ahead of us to the west. Somewhere up there was Durdle Door, a spectacular natural arch over the sea and our first destination for today. For now, however, it was all we could do to make out a curve of white limestone cliffs facing out to sea.

Still, even this exceptionally rainy day in a record-breakingly wet English summer only added to our sense of adventure. Along with my wife, Harvard University historian of science Anne Harrington, I was co-leading 15 students from the Harvard Summer School study abroad program on an exploration of England’s Jurassic Coast: a near-100-mile stretch of rocks and fossils that had been a major inspiration for the founders of historical geology some two centuries ago.

Few landscapes on the planet are more open to scientific inspection. As if for the convenience of geologists, the rocks of the Jurassic Coast are laid out in an almost unbroken sequence that runs from the early Triassic period, some 250 million years ago, to the twilight of the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period, roughly 65 million years ago. Walking westward, as we were doing, is like journeying further and further back through an estimated 185 million years of deep time.

The fossil-hunters and naturalists who pored over the Jurassic Coast in the early 19th century were awestruck by this orderly sequence of sedimentary rocks, suggestive of an almost endless series of changes in this one place on earth. And they were equally entranced by the extraordinary fossils that they pulled out of the cliffs and rock falls. Here were plants and animals like nothing seen today, including fish-like reptiles dubbed ichthyosaurs and flying reptiles known as pterodactyls. All testified to radically different forms of life that had come and gone over the course of unimaginable ages. Writing in 1836, one of the leading geologists of his day, the Reverend William Buckland of the University of Oxford, warned his readers that some of what he was about to describe was “much more like the dreams of fiction and romance, than the sober results of calm and deliberate investigation.”

I have always had a soft spot for Buckland and the other clerical naturalists who walked this coast in the 1820s and 1830s. As