大象传媒

Adam Walton visits the National Museum, Cardiff to see the exhibition that marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of the first geological map of Great Britain. The exhibition of William Smith's maps is at the museum until 28th February 2016.

Adam is joined throughout the programme by geologist Tom Sharpe, who worked at the Museum for 35 years and looked after the world's largest collection of copies of William Smith's landmark map.聽


William Smith travelled extensively across Britain working as a surveyor of coal mines, and noticed when going down the mine shafts, that the layer of rocks with coal seams between them, always occurred in the same sequence, and they always sloped in the same direction. During his surveying work he also noticed that fossils were particular to the strata they occurred in. He amalgamated all his acquired knowledge into his 1815 map - "a delineation of the strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland".聽