Newcastle – once a tropical paradise?
Scientists working on a major environmental project in Newcastle say they’ve uncovered evidence of the city’s much warmer past.
If you’ve ever wandered round the centre of Newcastle on a Saturday night and wondered why the city’s young people seem reluctant to dress appropriately for a party town perched on the edge of the North Sea just a few miles south of the Arctic (or so it can feel), then it seems an explanation could now be at hand.
Engineers drilling deep beneath the city for a green energy project have discovered fossil remains of exotic shells and coral that suggest that Newcastle was once a tropical environment like that off the shore of the Bahamas. Among the fossils was an early relation of the starfish that would have fed on microscopic algae in the water. The area where the city now stands would have been completely underwater at the time.
The borehole project, which has cost over a million pounds, aims to harness geothermal power from the earth’s crust by pumping up hot water from thousands of metres below ground to provide heating at the surface.
Water at a temperature of 80c could in the future be used to warm hundreds of homes. Professor Paul Younger, the scientist in charge of the project said, “There isn’t really a limit to what we might gain from this. There is a huge volume of hot water down there; we could go on adding boreholes to run systems alongside this wherever there is the opportunity.”