UNDERFOOT NOTES / Sheet 1 of ∞ / Scale 1:1 boots
Clear answers about the ground we walk on, from pebbles to plate boundaries.
depth: 0 cm
Rocks, soils, hills, rivers and coastlines, and how they came to be the way they are.
0 cm
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.
30 cm
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.
60 cm
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.
90 cm
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.
120 cm
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.
150 cm
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.
180 cm
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.
210 cm
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.