SCARBOROUGH, ENGLAND (June 15, 2015) — It is difficult to believe that yesterday was so cold and wet. Today was beautiful on the Yorkshire Coast. Mae Kemsley (’16), Meredith Mann (’16) and I traveled to Reighton Sands for one last look through Mae’s outcrops. The tide was very low and the sunshine abundant, so we took lots of images and collected another bag of fossils. Above is the Speeton Clay (Lower Cretaceous). It rarely looks so good in photographs.
A scene from our morning commute from Scarborough. We like sitting in the top front of the double-decker bus.
The tide was low enough to expose the pair of boilers from the SS Laura. You may recall this Austro-Hungarian cargo ship ran aground here on November 21, 1897. These heavy and resistant boilers have served as coastal landmarks for over a century.
The SS Laura boilers are also a significant hard substrate for attaching mussels and barnacles.
The white chalk cliffs of northern Flamborough Head were especially beautiful today. I wish there was a way to record the sounds of thousands of circling seabirds.
We visited an outcrop of the Red Chalk (Hunstanton Formation, Lower-Upper Cretaceous) one last tme to collect more belemnites for Mae’s future analytical work.
We found quite a few Neohibolites, along with a coiled serpulid or two.
Then it was back to the gray Speeton Clay. After yesterday’s rain, the belemnites seemed very easy to find. Today we were after belemnites that had borings and/or encrusters.
Mae and Meredith took advantage of the beach to toss a frisbee around. They are both members of Wooster’s superb Ultimate Frisbee team.
We walked the long arc of Filey Bay to Filey. I was fascinated with the patterns in the sand left by the receding tide.
Those same sand patterns with a stone producing interference.
The seaside portion of Filey, viewed from the south.
And finally a view of Filey Brigg from Filey. We were very pleased to have our last field day such a pleasant one. We hope we’ve prepared the way for future Wooster Independent Study projects in this beautiful part of the world.
