Review by Liz Dexter
We now realize that throughout the past 66 million years, this land has been far from quiescent. It has been split by magma-filled cracks, wracked by great earthquakes, and spindled by faults, short-circuiting between the Alpine and Atlantic plate boundaries. Perhaps we need to develop a more realistic appreciation of unstable Britain, tectonically buffeted and reshaped, since this region first emerged.

Robert Muir-Wood is head of research at the world’s largest catastrophic modelling company and a visiting professor at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at UCL. His twin interests are the history of science and seismotectonics (i.e. the study of tremors and earthquakes based around tectonic plates and their movements and boundaries) and in this book he takes a worldwide view and also a close view of the geological forces that have shaped the British Isles, including plate tectonic and volcanic activity that we maybe wouldn’t associate immediately with our fairly quiet island.
I would say this is for the highly interested person with some expertise in or decent knowledge of the subject: Muir-Wood goes into a lot of detail on the various faults and geological formations in the British Isles and Europe. He does explain the first principles and use everyday metaphors like a crack in a wall, but I’m glad I had a good grounding in physical geography from my Geography A-level and continued interest since. It would be possible to read the main paragraphs and skim some of the exhaustive detail and still get a good picture of things. Interest and depth is given by Muir-Wood’s careful investigation of the figures who developed theories and knowledge of volcanic and other geological activity – including Charles Darwin, who pops up quite a lot, often with rather unfounded theories he then has to reassess.
Although there are not many women represented in the scientists Muir-Wood discusses, he does make the point that this is the case, and also notes he has a great-aunt palaeontologist, Helen Marguerite Muir Wood to thank for his own introduction to geology. He also points out how “myopically Eurocentric” the lens of 19th century geology was with its naming of eras and epochs. As well as tectonics and earthquakes there is also quite a lot on glaciation and sea level changes in this comprehensive work.
We get lots of great gems of information – why was the London Underground easier to build and more watertight than those in New York and Berlin? Did you know that Spain was originally part of the African plate until it collided with France and stuck onto it? Why would living in southern and western Britain from 45 to 25 million years ago have been like living in modern-day Turkey (the potential for devastating earthquakes)? Did you know that the discharge as the lake between England and Europe broke its banks was the greatest volume of flood discharge in the last million years? Other stats are more modern and scary: Britain may lead the world in land loss, thanks to the fast erosion of our soft north-eastern rocks.
The final sections of the book provide a very useful summary of the nine main tectonic episodes in the prehistory of Great Britain, since the end of the dinosaurs. Muir-Wood also provides a list of his top ten unsolved mysteries of geological Britain, still waiting to be worked out, which is fascinating. The final chapter itself looks into the future: will there be an active volcano on our islands again? He shares a story published in Strand Magazine in 1897, which has presumably inspired the jacket illustration, and his own idea of what might happen in, say, 2032 and onwards, when strange judderings shake the land: a whimsical finish to a serious scientific book, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
As well as a useful epoch clock at the start of each chapter to anchor the reader in (deep) time, there are illustrations of fault and other tectonic zones (some of these are a little small and need a good peer), as well as reproductions of drawings and photographs of some of the main features discussed. There are comprehensive footnotes, with numbers in the text, and a good index.
One for the geology fan, and pulling together a lot of useful information to show some unusual facts and ideas underpinning our deceptively quiet land.

Liz Dexter does like a geomorphological feature. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Robert Muir-Wood, This Volcanic Isle: The Violent Processes that Forged the British Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2024). 978-0198871620, 338pp., ill. hardback.
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