Cycling commentators often talk for hours while little or nothing happens during the race. They are talking about good food, excellent restaurants, fine wines or castles along the route, which are always beautifully portrayed. Geologists from all over Europe now want to expand that spectrum of topics with information about the landscapes of the Tour de France and its underlying link to geology, as the Tour passes through geologically very interesting and rare areas.
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Neither commentators nor riders realize that during the upcoming Tour de France they will be crossing no less than three primeval continents, passing important dinosaur sites or driving through a volcano. “Many people find information about the landscapes as important as a story about a castle,” says Professor David De Vleeschouwer of the University of Münster in Germany. “That is why we hope that cycling commentators will take a look at our new website, so that they can also pass on that information to cycling enthusiasts.”
The arrival of the cobblestone stage in Arenberg, for example, is a stone’s throw from Bernissart. The well-known Iguanodons were excavated there in the 19th century, which are now displayed in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “The rocks that now form the Ardennes were scraped off 300 million years ago from a tectonic plate that pushed under a primordial continent,” says David De Vleeschouwer. “Compare it to a rolled-up sleeve that you slide over your arm. Your arm is the underlying plate, and that rolled-up, pleated ‘sleeve’: that is the Ardennes. 300 million years ago, the Ardennes looked like the Himalayas today. But millions of years of erosion have made sure that the sharpest edges have faded a bit.”
The initiator of the Geo-Tour-de-France is professor Douwe van Hinsbergen, professor at Utrecht University and an enthusiastic cycling enthusiast. “Suddenly I realized: a live broadcast of a cycling race also offers a perfect opportunity for a geological trip,” says van Hinsbergen. “Many cyclists and many spectators are interested in the landscapes they traverse during the race. At the same time, many earth scientists also enjoy cycling themselves.”
The geologists want to help cycling commentators with their knowledge of the landscapes and their underlying geological, but also paleontological facts. To achieve this, Van Hinsbergen approached colleagues from all over Europe with the aim of co-writing a series of blogs about the geology of the Tour de France. One of them is therefore the Belgian David De Vleeschouwer, himself a cycling enthusiast, professor of geology at the University of Münster (Germany) and alumnus of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Meteorite impact
This year’s Tour de France will take you through the remains of three ancient continents, along the traces of the meteorite impact that marked the end of the dinosaur age, through the chalk landscape of the white cliffs of Calais, over extinct volcanoes, and past many other fascinating geographic and geological phenomena on the trail. During the men’s race, various geological phenomena along the route and the processes responsible for them will be explained. “Who knows that the cobblestones on the Champs Elysées are made of granite from Saudi Arabia?”, De Vleeschouwer wonders. “Really incomprehensible for a geologist: there is a lot of perfectly usable granite in France.” The blogs hope to take readers to those vanished worlds and their inhabitants. The initiators naturally hope that the commentators will also share their info.
The website also pays attention to the modern landscapes along the route: how they came to be, the rivers and glaciers that flow through them, the nature of the soil, and the natural disasters such as landslides that can happen at any time. That is the specialty of physical geography, which usually deals with periods shorter than hundreds of thousands of years.
Did you know
“The public can share photos and ask questions via the Twitter hashtag #GeoTdF,” says De Vleeschouwer. “And during the tour, we’ll be posting daily knew-thats to our Twitter account @geotdf.”
The comments won’t be limited to the Tour de France itself: the Twitter account will explain the geology of cycling races around the world throughout the season. Researchers from seven countries participate in the Geo-Tour de France. In addition to the Belgian link with David De Vleeschouwer (WWU Münster, Germany) and the Dutch link with Douwe van Hinsbergen (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), the website will also contain contributions from geologists from Birmingham (United Kingdom), Montpellier and Rennes (France). , Granada (Spain), Utah (United States), Amsterdam, Leiden (Netherlands) and the Geological Survey of France, Denmark and Greenland.