UNDERFOOT NOTES / Sheet 1 of ∞ / Scale 1:1 boots
Clear answers about the ground we walk on, from pebbles to plate boundaries.
surveyor: Historian of Earth Science
Izaiah writes the history of earth science: the people, arguments and patient measurements behind what we now take for granted about the ground. He likes nothing better than finding the moment an idea finally clicked for someone, and the long detours before it did. He is quick to say he is still learning, and that the best part of history is how often careful people were wrong first.
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 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.
90 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.