Recent thesis explorations of soil as a cultural and sensory landscape (more to come) led me to these recently-discovered subterranean worlds. The first is a laser survey of the 450+ Nottingham Caves in the UK that perforate the sandstone cliffs that support the castle facade. Dubbed appropriately by National Geographic as "business in front, party in back" the Vikings who constructed these caves around 800AD intimately knew the economy and extravagance of space-making.
http://youtu.be/i6DJU09yKKg?hd=1
Images courtesy of Nottingham Caves Survey.
The second underground landscape is the largest fossilized tree forest found to-date from the Pennsylvanian geologic period (of the Carboniferous era) buried under 300 million years of sedimentation: the histories of plants, animals, and people. Today the cornfields of Illinois cover this window into an ancient ecology and a similar period of global warming. Read more on the New York Times or in Smithsonian. Renderings of these forests below with photographs of fragments of trunks, leaves, and roots.
Images courtesy of the Illinois State Geologic Survey.
http://youtu.be/i6DJU09yKKg?hd=1
Images courtesy of Nottingham Caves Survey.
The second underground landscape is the largest fossilized tree forest found to-date from the Pennsylvanian geologic period (of the Carboniferous era) buried under 300 million years of sedimentation: the histories of plants, animals, and people. Today the cornfields of Illinois cover this window into an ancient ecology and a similar period of global warming. Read more on the New York Times or in Smithsonian. Renderings of these forests below with photographs of fragments of trunks, leaves, and roots.
Images courtesy of the Illinois State Geologic Survey.
