Author: Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

Grey on white in marine blue. In the shallow seas enveloping the Earth in the geological time we call the Cretaceous (130-60 million years ago), miniature marine creatures were shedding their shells. Billions upon billions of these tiny globes of lime and silica drifted to the sea bottom. Over millions of years, they compounded into thick chalk. During the Ice Ages, frozen seas levelled and lifted sedimentary rocks. About 12,000 years ago a retreating glacier upthrust a chalk deposit into the 128-metre-high cliff we know as Møns Klint, part of the ancient chalk seabed connecting Ireland, cliffs of Dover, Germany, Denmark and southern Russia.
As a regular visitor to Møns Klint and the Møn Unesco Biosphere, Denmark, I have translated the Earth’s epic of sediment accumulation and erosion into a hand-size poem and a print made with chalk and Baltic seawater. Møn’s weathers and rocks have been condensed by Julie Johnstone of Essence Press into an artist’s book. In your hands now: our geological and environmental past, present and future.  Fog on chalk in sea.