Landscapes of the past, a landscape for the future

Andy Emery

Spark. The noise of the seismic source. Spark. The regular firing of electric pulse. Spark. Sending sound waves to the seabed. Spark. Through the sediments, reflecting from interfaces. Spark. Revealing past landscapes, buried and submerged. Spark.

Process the signal. Through pulses of red and black set against an ivory backdrop that gleams from two screens, illuminating my face through wan winter light, I see shapes. Subtle curves in stacked traces, lost landforms, the geometries of gently delineated geomorphic density.

As I scroll through seismic sections, sediments and stratigraphy synthesise and coalesce to form a real landscape in my mind. The swales and swells that emerge as I spin northeast, line after line, mouse button worked within a whisker of its life, reveal a landscape that existed, not persisted, for a brief moment between blue ice and blue sea. It is a landscape that exists preserved by process, and as I explore, I become the first to discover its marshes and mires, barriers and beaches, and conquer it as my own private land.

I name the landforms as I encounter and explore them, Redshank Marsh, Avocet Estuary, Marram Barrier, Birch River. As I wander my mental landscape, I discover the fauna that already inhabits it, those sturdy-billed, bandy, burgundy-legged redshank, the piebald, curve-billed avocet, the sharp shards of matted marram grass that mantle the dunes, low-tangled shrub-forest of dwarf birch, resplendent with tiny jewels of sap-green leaf and catkin, that flank the bank of the wide, gravel-shingled braided river that once flowed across this landscape.

Ten millennia later, these records of past landscapes lie beneath names from the shipping forecast, Forties, Dogger, Tyne, Humber. The coast of the past, a ghost of the land, becomes the foundation for the future. Turbine towers two hundred metres high, a sweep of scythe-blade steel, grounded in shifting seabed sediment. Deep monopiles penetrate geological evolution, steadied by marsh mud, coastal clay, seaside sand. From my desk I explore landscapes long gone, geology on a computer, transposed into imagination, providing the missing piece of the jigsaw depicting a renewable future.

The Science

Using site survey data for offshore wind farms, the recent geological history of our offshore areas can be unraveled. This geological history is key to understanding what the sediments under the seabed are like. The type of sediments determines how foundations in the seabed are designed, to make sure offshore structures are stable. These sediments were laid down around 30,000 years ago when there was a large ice sheet in the North Sea, then modified as sea level rose, and formed coastlines similar to those of Norfolk and the Moray Coast today.

The Poet

Andy Emery is a geoscientist in the offshore renewables industry. He is often to be found in the mountains near his home in Scotland, climbing, walking, or just admiring the stunning scenery. He is relatively new to creative writing but has been published in a zine supporting an exhibition, has self-published a chapbook, and has published multiple scientific papers. He is on Twitter as @AndyDoggerBank.

Next poem: Perovskites Prospectus by Leslie D. Almberg