Murray McConnell, age 13, of Aroostook
What caused the White Cliffs of Dover?
The steep white cliffs rise 700 to 800 feet above the wild waves at their feet: Their stern, grey‑white brows frown down upon the choppy English Channel, facing a sister wall of chalk cliffs along the coast of France, Since the dawn of history, the steep chalk cliffs have often acted as a bastion to protect England from invasion along her southern shores, But these few thousand years are but a moment in the long life story of the famous chalk cliffs.
A human lifetime is too short to notice any changes in the face of the earth. We do not notice the gentle hills grow and shrink, The farm in the valley is just as it was in grandpas day and the same old river winds down the same old trail to the sea. But this luxurious planet of ours has had at least four billion birthdays and during that time she has changed her face many times. The life of the white cliffs began perhaps a hundred million years ago and only in the last short million years did they lift their steep brows above the water.
The various rocks of the earth’s crust are constantly forming and re‑forming. Granites and gritty lavas are spewed forth in the roaring fury of volcanic eruption. Whispering rivers gather dust and debris and gently dump them at the shorelines to make new land. Massive mountains are lifted aloft when the crustal rocks bend and buckle as the old earth seems to hump her back. In the past, the seas slopped over vast land areas many times and receded, Great glaciere crept down from tho north. clawing and reshaping the earth with icy fingers.
A few of these rocky stories are violent dramas but most of them happen too slowly for us to notice.
The story of the white cliffs has a few dramatic events, but most of it was a slow, slow building, Their chalk is formed from the shells of a type of tiny sea dweller whose children still teem in our seas. He is called foraminifera, the window maker. For he builds a chalky shell to protect his soft body and in it puts a little window.
A hundred million years ago, the whole region of the white cliffs was under shallow seas. Foraminifera, in countless numbers and countless generations, left worn‑out shells to sift down to the sea floor. .There they formed thick layers of chalky ooze.
Then, perhaps a million years ago, the seas receded and this whole area was left high and dry. What is now England was joined to what is now Europe by a vast, chalky land mass. The Ice Ages came and went, stealing the ocean waters and clawing at the land. At some time during the last 50,000 years, a great rift was cut into the chalk beds. The sea, brim full with waters from the melting glaciers, swept in to separate England from the continent. The white cliffs are the walls of this canyon in the chalk beds.