The Father of English Geology
William Smith, 1769–1839, has been called the ‘Father of English Geology’. His pioneering map of 1815, depicting the geology of England, Wales and part of Scotland, helped to shape the economic and scientific development of Britain, just as the country was experiencing the Industrial Revolution.
William Smith was born in rural Oxfordshire in 1769. The son of the village blacksmith, Smith was the eldest of five children. After elementary education at the village school, where he developed a liking for geometry and drawing, he decided to teach himself the skills of surveying, possibly because there were an increasing number of openings for that profession. At the age of 18, he was employed by Edward Webb, a surveyor in a nearby town, and subsequently, in 1791, he set up in business on his own.
As a boy, Smith had developed an interest in the exposures of rock and the fossils which were to be found locally. As an adult, his surveys of land that would be suitable for building canals, and for sources of building stone and coal in other parts of England, led to a great increase in his knowledge and awareness of various geological features.
As he travelled, he found the strata that he was familiar with in the south of England were repeated in other areas, with some outcrops—the rocks emerging above ground—stretching right across the country. Coal miners were already aware of the occurrences of regular successions of workable coal seams. But on a larger scale, Smith began to recognise that sedimentary rocks could be identified by the fossils they contained, and that these rocks were always arranged in the same order. Smith’s discovery that beds of rocks can be distinguished by the fossils found in them was a concept virtually unrecognised by geologists of that period.
Working on this principle, Smith was able to draw up a table of successive strata which could be applied in any other locality—an early version of the geological column.
By 1799, Smith was using both his skills as a surveyor and the knowledge gained from his observations in the field to draw up a geological map. This first map was circular in form, covered the area around the city of Bath, and was exhibited at the Bath Agricultural Society. At the same time, Smith continued to plan the publication of a treatise describing his discoveries, but financial support proved difficult to find. In 1801, Smith produced a small geological map of England and Wales which illustrated the outcrops of seven geological formations.
Other maps were produced for exhibition at various meetings, but it was not until 1815 that, with input from the enterprising map publisher John Cary, Smith’s first major map actually appeared. It was called ‘A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland; exhibiting the Collieries and Mines, the Marshes and Fen Lands originally overflowed by the Sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names’.
Based on Cary’s new topographical map at the scale of five miles to the inch, Smith’s map showed the outcrops of some twenty formations. Other publications on stratigraphy followed, including his major mapping publication, ‘Geological Atlas’, comprising maps of 21 counties. Published between 1819 and 1824, these maps represent a first attempt at systematic sheet mapping of England and Wales.
Despite the importance of his ideas and publications, Smith continued to find recognition elusive, and it was not until 1831, when the Geological Society awarded him the first Wollaston Medal, that the importance of his achievements was finally acknowledged. In his citation, the geologist Adam Sedgwick called Smith the ‘Father of English Geology’.
From time to time, Smith’s expertise continued to be drawn upon for major projects. In 1838, he was commissioned to accompany Henry De la Beche and Sir Charles Barry on a tour of the principal stone quarries to recommend the stone to be used in the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament, which had been destroyed by fire in 1835. The practical nature of the commission provides a link between Smith’s work and that of De la Beche and his newly founded Geological Survey.
The main focus of Smith’s work was to apply his observations and ideas to the everyday needs of the canal builders, quarry- and mine-owners, landowners and agriculturists who were underpinning the Industrial Revolution. His understanding of geology enabled him to predict where coal or different types of stone could be found, which was very useful for mining companies. He talked at meetings about geology and its valuable contribution to the national economy.
The methods involved in map production have developed and the ways in which people access maps have altered radically since Smith’s time. However, his conviction that geological mapping is of vital importance at many levels and in many areas of the nation’s society, science and industry is as true today as it was two centuries ago, when he conceived his original geological map. It is as vital for today’s industries to be provided with accurate geological map data as it was in Smith’s time.
* Strata: layers of rock in the ground.
Removing Unwanted Noise
A A noisy restaurant, a busy road or a windy day are all situations that can be intensely frustrating for the hearing-impaired when trying to understand what other people are saying. Some 10 million people in the UK suffer from hearing difficulties and, helpful as hearing aids are, those who wear them often complain that background noise continues to interfere with their understanding. But what if hearing-aid wearers could choose to filter out all the troublesome sounds and focus just on the voices they want to hear?
Engineer Dr Richard Turner believes that this is fast becoming a possibility. He is developing a system that identifies the distracting noise and ‘rubs it out’. ‘The poor performance in noise of current hearing devices is a major reason why six million people in the UK who would benefit from hearing aids do not use them,’ he said. Moreover, as the population ages, a greater number of people will be hindered by the inability to hear clearly. In addition, hearing-impaired patients who have been fitted with cochlear implants—devices implanted to help those whose auditory hair cells have died—suffer from similar limitations.
B The solution lies in the statistics of sound, as Turner explained: ‘Many interfering noises are immediately recognisable. Raindrops patter on a surface, a fire crackles, talkers babble at a party and the wind howls. But what makes these different noises sound the way they do? No two rain sounds are identical because the precise arrangement of falling water droplets is never repeated. Nonetheless, there must be statistical similarities in the sounds of these raindrops compared with, say, the crackle of a fire.’ He believes that for this reason, the brain may be able to group similar types of sounds together based on their specific characteristics.
Turner and his colleagues have analysed this process mathematically and then developed algorithms that mimic what the brain is doing. The mathematical system that they have developed is capable of being ‘trained’—a process that uses new methods from the field of machine learning—so that it can recognise new sounds. ‘Rather surprisingly, it seems that a relatively small set of statistics is sufficient to describe a large number of sounds,’ he says. Crucially, the system that Turner and his team have come up with is capable of telling the difference between speech and other types of sound.
C ‘What we can now do is to erase background noise and pass these cleaned-up sounds to a listener to improve their perception in difficult surroundings,’ said Turner. The idea is that future devices will have several different modes in which they can operate. These might include a mode for travelling in a car or on a train, a mode for places like a noisy party or a busy restaurant, a mode that can be used outdoors in windy weather, and so on. The device might intelligently select an appropriate mode based on the characteristics of the incoming sound.
D ‘In a sense we are developing the technology to underpin intelligent hearing devices,’ said Turner. An additional possibility would be for users to override the selection made by the device and select a processing mode based upon what sorts of noise they wish to erase. They could even guide the processing on their device using an interface on a mobile phone through wireless communication. Turner anticipates that his team will need two more years of simulating the effect of modifications that clean up sound before they start to work with device specialists. ‘If these preliminary tests go well, then we’ll be looking to work with hearing-device companies to try to adapt their processing in order to incorporate these machine-learning techniques.’
E Tinnitus sufferers, who are plagued by a constant ringing in their ears, could also benefit from the technology. At present, people with tinnitus sometimes use environmental sound generators as a distraction from the ringing in their ears. But such generators offer only a limited selection of sounds—a gently flowing stream, waves lapping on the seashore or leaves rustling. With the new technology, individual patients could select the best sound to distract them from their tinnitus.
F The technology not only holds promise for helping the hearing-impaired, but it also has the potential to improve phone calls—anyone who has ever tried to hold a conversation with someone phoning from a crowded room will recognise the possible benefits of such a facility. Systems that can deal with unwanted audio content would also be welcomed by the increasing numbers of people using video-sharing websites. For example, a video containing a conversation that takes place by a busy roadside on a windy day could be made more intelligible by isolating the speech from the noises—users could even be offered the chance to de-noise their video during the upload process.
The Bug Picture
Lara Zanarini gives her view on insects.
How many other species do we share our planet with? The truth is that scientists don’t have the slightest idea. Some early guesses of 30 million or even 100 million have been replaced in the last few years with more reliable ones of somewhere between five and ten million species. But despite this massive uncertainty, there is one thing which is indisputable: the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants are invertebrates—without a backbone—and most of those are insects.
It is therefore not very surprising that these creatures have a pre-eminent impact on the functioning of global ecosystems. Creatures like us—and I don’t just mean primates, such as apes and monkeys, but all vertebrates (back-boned animals)—make up less than three per cent of all species.
Yet it is these very animals that most people hold dear, especially those with a passing resemblance to ourselves. I use a slide in my lectures which has images of all sorts of insects along with one face-on image of a female slender loris, a wide-eyed furry primate, with a baby on its back. No prizes for guessing the first, and probably the only, thing audiences look at. It seems we can’t help ourselves. Appealing they may be, but in the great ecological scheme of things, they are fairly useless. If you really want to understand the world around you, you need to take a serious look at insects.
Pollination, the process by which flying insects transfer grains of pollen from one plant to another and so aid their reproduction, is perhaps one of the most essential partnerships ever to have evolved. This plant–insect version of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ has been around for 100 million years, and it has given the world a rich diversity, and not just of flowering plants. Twenty thousand species of bee are responsible for the continued survival of the angiosperms, which include a very long list of fruit and vegetables, from pumpkins, plums and peas to cherries, cucumbers and cocoa.
What about herbivory and carnivory—plant- and meat-eating? Ecology really doesn’t get much more basic than this. The light energy from the sun is converted to chemical energy, and the plants—the producers—that carry out this astonishing transformation are fed on by primary consumers—the herbivores. They in turn are eaten by secondary consumers—the carnivores. But it may come as a surprise to many that all the herds of grazing ungulates—cows, goats and sheep—are entirely ‘out-munched’, perhaps by a factor of ten to one, by myriads of tiny insects. What about the meat-eaters? Again, insects consume many times more animal flesh than all vertebrate carnivores put together, and ants alone are the major carnivorous species in any habitat you could mention.
If this sounds implausible, consider that although insects are individually small, there are an awful lot of them—an estimated ten million, million, million (10¹⁹)—with an impressively large biomass. Insects are also the major food source for countless species. Many trillions of creatures a year are eaten by insect-eating species of birds, bats and a multitude of other furry and feathery animals. Space prevents me from extolling the role of insects in global decomposition and nutrient recycling.
But there is a problem looming—the first effects of which we are already feeling. Almost every study that has been done to date points to a steady decline in insect species’ richness and abundance. The loss of natural habitat and the prodigious amounts of pesticides used in agriculture are taking their toll. The decreases seen in well-studied insect groups such as bees and butterflies are surely taking place in many other groups as well. At what point does the web of life become so frayed that it starts to disintegrate? We may find out sooner rather than later.
It is thought that the world’s tropical forests hold more than half of all extant species. If these complex habitats are being felled and degraded at even the slowest rate that has been suggested, it will still only be a matter of a few hundred years before they are lost. It is therefore an inescapable conclusion that our planet could lose more than half of all its living species in the time it takes for a tiny acorn to become a veteran oak tree.
There’s no doubt about it—we are the most intelligent and capable species yet to evolve on Earth. In a very short time after our appearance, we covered the entire globe, establishing colonies wherever it was possible to survive. A few of us have walked on the surface of the Moon and visited the deepest abysses of the oceans. We spend vast sums of money to probe the very make-up of matter and remotely examine other parts of our solar system. We want to understand the science of everything from the infinitesimally small to the astronomically large. This truly is ‘big’ science, and of course it’s expensive. But do we have to do it right now? What about understanding the environment a bit better? Perhaps what we actually need is a bit more ‘bug’ science.
* Biomass: the total quantity or weight of organisms in a certain area.