UNDERFOOT NOTES / Sheet 1 of ∞ / Scale 1:1 boots
Clear answers about the ground we walk on, from pebbles to plate boundaries.
0–30 cm
Grind a rock as fine as you like and you still won't have soil. Here is what garden dirt has that rock dust lacks: air, water, the remains of the living, and a crowd of small workers. It ends with a jar test you can do on the kitchen bench.
30 cm
Earth 1 September 2026 · 10 min
A canal surveyor noticed that rock layers stack in a fixed order and carry their own fossils, and used that to colour the first geological map of a whole country in 1815. Here is how the idea grew, what it got right, and why geological maps still work the same way.
60 cm
Big Questions 27 June 2026 · 13 min
Nobody has ever drilled anywhere near the Earth's centre, yet we know it has a liquid outer core and a solid inner one. The answer is a century of detective work, using the way earthquake waves bend, slow down and disappear on their way through the planet.
90 cm
Physics 24 May 2026 · 11 min
Earthquakes send out two kinds of waves: one pushes and pulls, the other shakes side to side. Only the first can cross a liquid, and that difference is how we learned the Earth has a liquid outer core.
120 cm
Earth 31 March 2026 · 13 min
An earthquake is slowly squeezed rock suddenly slipping and sending waves outward. It took people a few centuries, plenty of wrong turns and some patient measuring to see it that way. Here is the story, and the physics behind that first thump and the sway that follows.
150 cm
Earth 19 February 2026 · 11 min
Volcanoes aren't scattered at random. Most sit where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, or where a plate slides over a long-lived source of heat. Here is the step-by-step picture, with a little arithmetic and a few honest "we're not sure yet" moments.
180 cm
Matter 16 January 2026 · 12 min
Water is one of the few common substances that takes up more room as a solid than as a liquid. That oddity is why a forgotten jar splits in the freezer, and why frost slowly pries cliffs, roads and mountain slopes apart.
210 cm
Earth 19 November 2025 · 11 min
A pebble is smooth because every knock against another stone takes off its sharpest parts first, and there are a great many knocks on the way down a river. Getting people to believe that slow wearing could explain the rounded stones in their own valleys took geologists a surprisingly long time.
240 cm
Big Questions 13 September 2025 · 7 min
Nobody measured the Earth's age with a single clever test. It took centuries of looking at rock layers, one wrong-but-careful estimate, and the discovery that atoms keep time. Here's how the pieces fit together.
270 cm
Earth 13 July 2025 · 10 min
Every rock you pick up has a life story, and nearly all of them fit one of three plots: cooled from melt, pressed from settled bits, or changed by heat and squeezing. Here's how to read the clues in your own hand, and why the "families" are really one long loop.
300 cm
Earth 12 June 2025 · 8 min
A century ago, a meteorologist suggested that the continents had once been joined and slowly drifted apart. He was mostly right, but it took decades, and a lot of ocean-floor mapping, for the idea to catch on.
330 cm
Earth 2 June 2025 · 5 min
Start with the grass or gravel under your feet and keep going, through soil, rock, crust, mantle and core, all the way to the centre of the Earth. Along the way: how we know what's down there when nobody has ever been anywhere near it.
360 cm
Earth 7 April 2025 · 7 min
Rain tastes of nothing much, rivers taste of very little, and yet the sea is properly salty. The answer lies in what a raindrop picks up on its way down and what evaporation leaves behind.