This edited article about chalk originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 703 published on 5 July 1975.

Bleriot crosses the famous challk-white cliffs of Dover

If you look at a tiny fragment of blackboard chalk through a fairly powerful microscope, a fantastic world is opened up before your eyes.

Each speck of chalk is seen to have a most unusual shape: here is a tiny white star, there is a small sphere covered with minute holes, there again is a minute and delicate sea shell.

All these white stars and hollow globes are in fact the skeletons of microscopic sea creatures that lived in the sea many millions of years ago.

In their living state most of these animals looked like tiny blobs of jelly less than a hundredth of an inch across. Through the holes in some of the skeletons thin jelly-like tentacles projected out into the surrounding sea water, intertwining to form tiny nets to collect food.

Most of the star-shaped and sharp spiky skeletons are the skeletons of tiny sponges.

Mixed with all these strange skeletons we can also see crushed fragments which are the powdered remains of skeletons of other living creatures, such as sea-urchins.

When all these microscopic and primitive living creatures died their skeletons slowly drifted down to the sea bed, and formed a layer of creamy mud or “ooze.”

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about caving originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 698 published on 31 May 1975.

Cavers or pot-holers discover a subterranean world of beauty among the stalactites and stalagmites

Man has been to the moon, climbed the highest mountains, visited the sea’s depths and flown faster than sound. What else is there for an adventurous individual to do? One answer is to scramble deep below the surface of the Earth, to explore the tunnels and caverns that ancient rivers fashioned into a strange and beautiful wonderland.

Not content with exploring these, men have tested their ability to endure long periods in this cold and awe-inspiring world. Milutin Veljkovic of Yugoslavia set the world record for this when he spent 463 days between 1969 and 1970 in a cavern in the Svrljig mountains of northern Yugoslavia. But he was not entirely alone, for he took a cat, a dog and some hens and ducks for company.

Time means little to people when there are no days and nights but the perpetual glimmer of an oil lamp. When David Lafferty went into Gough’s Cave, Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, he tried to keep a check on the passing of time. Companions joined him towards the end of his stay and told him that August had arrived. A surprised Mr. Lafferty had thought that it was only July. Since he had been in the cave from 27th March, this was not unexpected. By remaining in the cave until 4th August in 1966, Mr. Lafferty set up a British record of 130 days underground.

He achieved this in a cave found in 1867 by a Mr. Gough and his sons. They came across it after exploring fantastically beautiful tunnels spiked with stalactites and stalagmites. Behind some rubble, they discovered not only a new series of caves but something else which set their imaginations reeling. Among the rocks lay the skeleton of a man which was estimated to be at least twelve thousand years old. When this man was alive, people had ceased to live in caves. They had learned to build huts and defend themselves with weapons. And they hunted the reindeer, cave-lion and brown bear which, with the mammoth, roamed the Somerset hills.

So why had this early man gone into the Cheddar caves? Perhaps he, too, had gone in search of adventure, like the underground explorers of today, as a pioneer pot-holer of ancient times.

This edited article about Cumbria originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 696 published on 17 May 1975.

William Wordsworth at Dove Cottage by Harry Green

John Paul Jones, his cocked hat set firmly on his head, his sword swinging at his waist, ran up the companion way of his ship, “Ranger”, as it swept smoothly before the breeze into a quiet English harbour.

A number of British vessels were at anchor and Jones could just see them in the moonlight.

He rapped a sharp order to the gunners to prime their cannons and take aim. Suddenly, there was a succession of loud reports, and red flashes illuminated the ships gently straining at their anchors.

“Fire,” shouted Jones again. And once more the cannons boomed, their projectiles striking their targets squarely. Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, the ships burst into flames one by one, and the red glow lit up the guns of the shore battery.

At a command from Jones, the gunners switched their aim to the shore cannons and soon put them out of action.

By now, the whole town was aroused, and ships which had not been hit in the earlier attack began putting to sea. Realising that he was about to be very speedily outnumbered, Jones turned and ran – and peace once again returned to the quiet harbour.

Jones was an American privateer who created havoc around the coast of Britain during the American War of Independence. And this attack in 1778 was upon Whitehaven, a town upon the coast of Cumbria, a county created in April last year.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about fog originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 695 published on 10 May 1975.

A scene in London fog, once known as a pea-souper

With very little warning, fog will settle over land or sea. At sea, ships have to reduce speed and run the risk of collision, and on land, rail and road transport is reduced to a crawl.

It has been estimated that one day of heavy fog in a city like London costs over one million pounds. This huge bill is made up of delays to transport, working time lost through people being late for work, charges for extra lighting, and damage to goods.

If fog could be done away with, the gain to a country’s health and wealth would be enormous.

A great deal of Britain’s fog begins far out in the Atlantic. There currents of air warmed by the Gulf Stream take up water moisture from the sea.

The water is in the form of vapour, rather like the steam produced by water boiling in a kettle. But unlike steam from a kettle, the water vapour is invisible.

When the stream of warm air carrying the water vapour meets a cold layer of air or passes over cold ground, the water vapour in the air condenses. This means that it turns into water again.

The same thing happens when steam from a kettle strikes against the comparatively cold wall of the kitchen and trickles down as water.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about glaciers originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 694 published on 3 May 1975.

Prehistoric landscape with glaciers

For thousands of years the river of solid ice has been creeping down the mountainside, slowly and relentlessly grinding and cutting a valley between the mountain peaks capped with their eternal snow.

This moving river of ice is called a glacier, from the Latin-French word glacis meaning ice.

How are frozen rivers such as this one formed? When snow falls on high mountains, one of two things can happen.

The sun may melt the snow so that it flows down the mountain as a river of water.

But if the mountain top is very cold the snow hardens and slides down into a valley. If the valley is also very cold the snow collects there and is squeezed and frozen into the river of ice we call a glacier.

Pushed forward by the ice forming behind it, the glacier moves slowly down the valley, scratching and grinding the rocks over which it passes and in time digging out for itself a deep channel.

During its formation and while it is travelling down the mountain, a glacier collects large pieces of rock which become frozen into it and stick out like teeth from the bottom of the ice. While the immense weight of ice is moving, these teeth cut great grooves in the ground over which the ice is passing.

A lot of glaciers end their lives in warmer valleys where their ice melts and becomes a stream or small river.

You will find them where there are high mountains and a cold climate. Antarctica, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, the Himalayas and Switzerland are the great breeding grounds of glaciers.

In Switzerland, where there are over two thousand of them, glaciers are quite short, seldom more than four miles long. But in Antarctica they are hundreds of miles long and sixty miles wide.

In very cold parts of the world, particularly in Antarctica and the far north of the American continent, glaciers move down to the sea. There huge pieces of the frozen rivers break off and float away as icebergs.

This edited article about Colonel P T Etherton originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 692 published on 19 April 1975.

A camel caravan in the Pamir Mountains; (inset) a shepherd and his flock. Pictures by Graham Coton

The expedition across the Roof of the World had been under way for two weeks when it came to the ‘snow bridge’ – the first of the obstacles which people said could not be passed. The bridge, a mass of snow and solid ice which had fallen down from the surrounding mountains, was the only means of crossing the foaming river underneath.

It looked anything but safe, and the coolies who carried the expedition’s stores and equipment wanted to turn back. But their leader, Lieutenant-Colonel P. T. Etherton, would not hear of such a thing. He had vowed to complete the ‘impossible’ 4,000-mile journey from northern India to Siberia, and was prepared to risk his life rather than fail at the attempt.

Urging the men to follow him, he set out along the precarious catwalk accompanied by his orderly, Rifleman Sing. Reluctantly the coolies followed after him. The colonel did not blame them for their hesitancy. Only a few hours earlier they had narrowly escaped death when an avalanche crashed down on them, and they were still shaking from the experience.

For the first few feet the bridge held the expedition’s weight. Then, when they were halfway over, there came an ominous ‘crack’. Suddenly the frozen snow broke in two and the men were pitched into the raging water. For a while it seemed that they would not get out alive. They were repeatedly dashed against jagged rocks, and the coolies were hampered by the baggage they carried.

Somehow they managed to cling on to the boulders which lined the bank, and were then able to scramble ashore. Apart from bumps and bruises, no one was badly hurt, but it was clear to the colonel that the natives’ spirit was broken, and that they would desert him at the first opportunity.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Nikolai Prjevalsky originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 690 published on 5 April 1975.

In Kazakhstan traders and pedlars tried to warn Prjevalsky of the dangers

Nikolai Prjevalsky’s walk through the old town of Alma Ata did not follow the route one would expect of a Russian Army Officer. Instead of keeping to the broad streets near the barracks he seemed intent on threading his way through the maze of dark and dirty streets which led towards the old bazaar.

As the streets narrowed, so the press of people hurrying to and fro grew more difficult and Nikolai found himself pushing past Chinese peasants, Tibetan pedlars, Turkish merchants and a whole assortment of fierce and unfamiliar faces. For Alma Ata was the capital of Kazakhstan in the extreme south east of Tsarist Russia. China was only a short distance away and the camel tracks through the vast wilderness of central Asia brought traders from as far away as Tibet and Mongolia.

It was these traders whom Nikolai wished to meet, but not for the wares they sold. From the barracks he could see the glorious snowcapped peaks of the Tien Shan mountains, and beyond lay the uncharted wastes of the Gobi Desert. Three thousand six hundred miles of emptiness, inscrutable and unconquered, yet it was Nikolai’s ambition to cross it. And the only men who could help him plan such a dangerous journey were the traders who crossed the fringes of the desert on their way to towns such as Alma Ata.

At last, Nikolai found the house he sought. No one in the tea house paid much attention to him and he simply sat there for several minutes, listening to the babble of voices.

Then he turned to a group of bashis, or camel pullers, and asked if they would help him cross the desert. The effect was electric. All conversation stopped as first one, then another of the traders and pedlars tried to warn him of the dangers.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about the Aurores Islands originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Nothing could be seen but the restless waves when the sailors looked out for the Aurores, by Ken Petts

Have you ever heard of the Aurores Islands? You will search a map in vain, for they are not marked. Like many other islands, they have vanished as completely as if they never existed. But that the Aurores did exist about two centuries ago, is vouched for by numerous reports and data reported over a number of years.

They were first reported by Captain Oyardvido, master of the sailing vessel Aurora (hence their name) in the early 1760′s. They were described as a group of islands, situated in the South Atlantic to the south-east of the Falkland Islands. Other vessels reported them and they were finally surveyed by a Spanish ship specially equipped for such work and were duly shown on all maps of that time.

Some years later, the captain of a vessel cruising in the vicinity decided he would take a look at these islands for himself. He studied his chart and altered course accordingly. He reached the spot, but of the islands there was no trace. He checked his bearings and posted a lookout in the crow’s nest. Nothing could be seen but the restless waves.

Had the ocean bed opened up and swallowed them in their entirety? Had Captain Oyardvido mistaken icebergs for land? Mist plays some curious tricks in that part of the world, but it is difficult to believe it could deceive an experienced seaman. At any rate, subsequent expeditions failed to find the islands and eventually the cartographers removed them from their maps.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about the sea originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Waves crashing on the seafront by Clive Uptton

Most of us think that the sea consists entirely of water. But in every hundred pounds weight of sea water there are about three and a half pounds of solid materials. Most of them are salts of one kind or another.

If all the salts could be taken out of all the world’s oceans and spread over the continents, they would form a crust several feet thick.

Another surprising thing is that sodium chloride, which is the chemists’ name for the salt we sprinkle on our food, makes up only three-quarters of the salts dissolved in sea water.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Rene Caillie originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Rene Caillie in search of Timbuktu by Angus McBride

The young French boy read on, lost to his humdrum surroundings. His imagination, through the pages of the book, had already transported him to mysterious, far-off places. Little did he know that one day, he would actually be setting forth on a journey that other travellers had declared to be impossible.

The most comfortable place to curl up with a good book was the bakehouse. It was warm, the smells were inviting and the ten-year-old Rene had a secret hideout behind the sacks of flour where he could read undisturbed for hours. His father grumbled that he did not help more in the bakery but Rene knew the exact time to come out of hiding and work hard for half an hour in order to avoid a beating.

On this day, however, his usual good sense deserted him. He was so absorbed in his book that he quite forgot the time and even failed to hear the shouts of rage when he did not appear. Only when the sacks were suddenly shifted and his father’s angry face appeared, did he realise that he was in trouble.

“Give me that book!” roared his father. Rene reluctantly handed over his precious copy of Robinson Crusoe, only to watch, horrified, as his father muttered “Trash” and sent it spinning towards the ovens. Regardless of the consequences, Rene bounded over and rescued it, shaking with fear and anger. But the expected fight to keep his most valued book never came. He was saved by the urgent need to get on with the jobs he should have done over the last half hour.

Rene Caillie never forgot the incident because it was reading Robinson Crusoe, he said, which changed the course of his life. Although he was only the son of a poor family in Western France, he determined to find fame as a traveller and explorer. In an era when well organised parties, backed by learned societies and rich patrons were filling in the empty spaces on the maps of the world, Rene set off, alone and almost penniless, to tackle the dangers of the Sahara desert.

Read the rest of this article »