Watch this 300-foot cliff collapse into the sea
The winding Cornish coastline in Britain’s southwest is ruggedly, stunningly beautiful.It’s a lot like Northern California, with sheep instead of redwoods. Waves blast through rocky blowholes. Steep cliffs plunge to the sea.
Literally.
Check out the video here, and embedded below, in which a massive 300-foot cliff takes a dive into the Atlantic Ocean. Geologist Richard Hocking captured the powerful collapse when he was out assessing the area for the Cornwall Council a couple of weeks ago.
No one was reported injured, dead or missing. Thousands of tons of rock let loose a few days after authorities cordoned off the area for safety reasons.
The erosive power of the wind and the sea helped topple the cliff, so it seemed suitable to post this on the SmartPlanet Intelligent Energy site.If nature can bring a mountain to its knees, surely we can harness it via wind, tidal and osmotic turbines to help wean us off fossil-fuel electricity. I’ll throw in the thought that severe weather - which some experts say has been triggered by an over abundance of greenhouse gas emissions - speeds up erosion, even though in time the Rockies may crumble and Gibraltar may tumble (thank you George and Ira Gershwin).
Energy-related or not, enjoy the video, and stay away from the edge. For those of you up on British geography, the cliff was between Newquay and St. Ives. If you're an intrepid surfer you might be familiar with Newquay, but that’s another story. For the real aficionados, it was between Portreath and Godrevy, and of course, not far from a place called Dead Man’s Cove and another named Hell's Mouth.
Oh, gravity also had something to do with the cliff’s demise.
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You holding on to something? Here it is:
Photo: Captured from Youtube, original video by Richard Hocking.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com