1 research outputs found
Unravelling the past, modelling the future
Britain’s landscape provides our recreational space, has inspired poets and artists, and
has taken up countless hours of BBC TV airtime. It has absorbed the blood of hundreds of
battles over thousands of years. It conceals the treasures of our multicultural origins and
the spoils of the Industrial Revolution. Now it must support a population of slightly more
than 61 million people. For all its long history of human occupation, geologically speaking
it is a young landscape, sculpted by the waxing and waning of multiple ice ages and
changing sea levels over the past two million years. The last extensive ice cover receded
almost 20 000 years ago, leaving in its wake a landscape further sculpted by rising sea
levels, deforestation, and the inexorable propagation of urban environments. The pristine
and manicured landscape — the British countryside — that we cherish today is a far more
dynamic environment than we might at first realise