Geographical position of Great Britain. Climate. Mineral resources

In certain areas of the country, particularly parts of the Highlands of Scotland, relief and climatic conditions are not conducive to arable farming, and such areas are therefore characterized by extensive moorland. Moorlands are found in the upland areas of north and west England, where soils are thin, drainage is poor and rainfall heavy. Large areas are commonly covered with peat and contain numerous bogs.

The hilly moorlands provide several types of wild vegetation, such as heather, fern, other hill grasses and these are to be found in the Highlands of Scotland, the Pennines, the Lake District, the mountains of Wales and elsewhere with a surface of thin poor soils.

The soils of the British Isles vary from the thin poor podzolic ones of highland regions to the rich fertile brown forest soils of low-lying areas like the fenlands of eastern England, southern England and the western Midlands.

The animal life of the British Isles is now much poorer than it was a few centuries ago. With the disappearance of forests, many forest animals, including the wolf, the bear, the boar, the deer and the Irish elk, have become practically extinct. There are foxes in most rural areas, and otters are found along many rivers and streams. Of smaller animals there are mice, rats, hedgehogs, moles, squirrels, hares, rabbits and weasels.

There are a lot of birds, including many song-birds. Blackbirds, sparrows and starlings are probably most common. There are many sea-birds, which nest round the coasts and often fly far inland in search of food or shelter in rough weather.

MINERAL RESOURCES

The rise of Britain as an industrial nation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was partly due to the presence of considerable mineral resources, which provided raw materials as well as sources of power. She possessed abundant supplies of coal and an adequacy of iron ore — the two chief minerals on which the Industrial Revolution was based. Coal has been worked in Britain for 700 years, and as an industry, coal-mining has been in existence for over 300 years, twice as long as in any other European country. For over a century coal was the most important source of power and fuel in Britain. She had enough non-ferrous metals — copper, lead, and tin, for example, to meet her needs for a time. But in the course of the last hundred years or so the situation has gradually changed. Many of Britain's most valuable and accessible deposits have been worked out. Moreover, coal has lost some of its former importance, and such minerals as petroleum and uranium ores have become essential materials in the modern, world. At the same time British industry has become increasingly orientated towards lighter industry, and the heavier coal-field-based industries have tended to decline as the dependence upon coal as a source of power has declined. The absence in Great Britain of high-grade iron ore, manganese, chrome, nickel and many other rare metals makes her economy greatly dependent on imported raw materials.

Coal

The highly compressed remains of swamp forests, which at various times covered large areas of Britain, exist today as seams of coal. Coalfields are generally situated on the edges of the upland masses of the north and west.

Coal was first obtained on a commercial scale as far back as the thirteenth century, notably in Northumberland, from sites where the seams actually outcrop­ped and where the nearby rivers or coast afforded a means of transport. Much of the coal in the exposed coalfields has been exhausted and nowadays it is almost always necessary to penetrate a mantle of younger rocks in order to reach the coal measures, thus leading to the development of a concealed coalfield. Coal is mined from seams under the sea in Durham, Cumberland and Fifeshire (Scotland). In certain areas the coal occurs at easily worked depths, as in South Wales, but in other areas earth-movements have meant, that the coal measures have been sunk to unworkable depths.

Most coal comes from the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire field, which produces about 60 per cent of British output. This field is one of the easiest to mine because there are fewer faults, and the coal seams are particularly thick. Some 10 per cent of total output is produced respectively in South Wales and the Central Lowlands of Scotland. Other important coalfields are to be found in North-East England (the Northumberland and Durham area), the Cumberland coalfield, the South Lancashire coalfield. The production of coal in Kent (South-East England) started in 1918, and the annual output of about 1 million tonnes is used only in the local domestic market-Coal played a crucial part in the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its peak year, 1913, Britain's coal output reached 292 million tonnes, and the industry employed over a million workers. By the end of the Second World War production had dropped to below 200 million tonnes, largely because the thickest and most accessible seams had been worked out. Moreover, ex­ports had declined and the mines had suffered considerable loss of manpower. In 1947 the coal industry was nationalized on capitalist lines, because the private owners were no longer able to make a profit which satisfied them. The National Coal Board was set up to manage the industry. This purely capitalist nationa­lization carried out both due to economic necessity and the pressure of the working class, turned profitable for monopolies.

Oil and Gas

As the importance of coal has declined, oil has become of increasing significance. Crude oil can be refined to produce a wide variety of products including petrol and diesel oils for motor vehicles, aviation spirit, domestic heating oils, and even feedstuffs for animals. Up to the early 1960s, over 99 per cent of Britain's petroleum requirements were imported, primarily from the Middle Eastern coun­tries. Since then considerable discoveries of crude oil and natural gas have been made in the North Sea, and the first oil was brought ashore in 1975. Oil production has grown steadily since that time, amounting in 1987 to 123 million tonnes. The discovery of substantial offshore oil and gas reserves has changed Britain's energy position, it has become self-sufficient in energy.

The most important offshore oilfields are to be found off the coasts of north-east England and especially eastern and northern Scotland.

With the growth in offshore oil production Britain has become an important oil exporter, mostly to the USA and West Germany. The share of imports has fallen considerably, though Britain continues to import heavy crude oil of lower quality from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Norway, primarily for the production of diesel oil widely used by motor transport.

In charge of the British oil industry are the two leading companies — British Petroleum (BP) and Shell, which gain tremendous profits from the industry. They are the two largest industrial companies in Britain in terms of turnover.

For many years gas was produced from coal and had important applications as fuel for domestic gas stoves and systems of central heating, in steel-making and in other industrial processes. But during the 1960s, when growing supplies of oil were being imported, there was a switch lo producing town gas from oil-based feedstocks.

However, a more significant change began in the late 1960s following the first commercial natural gas discovery in the North Sea in 1965 and the start of offshore gas production in 1967. Supplies of the offshore natural gas grew rapidly and natural gas now replaced town gas as the source of gas for the public supply system in Britain.

Iron Ore 

Although iron ore is one of the most abundant metals in the earth's crust, only those rocks which contain 25 per cent or more of iron are considered worthy of exploita­tion as iron ores. The total reserves of iron ore in Britain are estimated at 3.8 billion tonnes.

Iron ores are widely found, though they differ in the manner of their formation, colour, appearance, iron content, chemical and physical properties and the quality of metal produced. British iron ores are of poor quality, their iron content ranging from 22 to 32 per cent. In Britain two chief types of iron ore are found: haematite and Jurassic. Haematite contains up to 70 per cent of metal and usually occurs in rocks of Cumberland, near Barrow-in-Furness. But this high-grade ore is nearly exhausted. The Jurassic iron ores contain only about half as much iron as haematite, or even less. They are frequently found in the rocks which extend from the Cleveland Hills, in Yorkshire southward through Lincolnshire and Northamptonshi­re, as well as in Lancashire and North Staffordshire.

Most of iron fields in Great Britain are to be found in the areas of major coal-basins, and this created favorable conditions for the development of metallur­gy, especially at early stages of its history.

As the metallurgical industry expanded, the failing supplies of domestic ore could no longer keep pace with the demands for the production of pig-iron and steel. Home production was greatly supplemented, and later greatly surpassed, by imports.

The production of other metallic minerals is overshadowed by the importance of coal and, more recently, petroleum. Great Britain has no large-scale sources of non-ferrous metals, but small scattered deposits of lead, tin, copper, zinc and even gold have been known and worked at various times during the last three thou­sand years, hi the pre-Christian era Phoenicians visited Cornwall in search of tin, which is found in association with copper among igneous rocks. The Romans, who were pioneers of plumbing, worked lead mines in Derbyshire. As recently as a century ago, Britain was still a leading producer of non-ferrous ores, especially of tin in Cornwall and of lead in Derbyshire, Cumberland and elsewhere. But now hardly any deposits are being worked. Most of the mines are exhausted, while others lie neglected and flooded.

Some other minerals are found but not extensively worked. Tin, which was once the chief mineral production in the British Isles, is now only worked spasmodically in two mines in Cornwall, while copper, also important at one time is no longer wor­ked. Very small quantities of manganese are found in the tin mining areas of Corn­wall, and some bauxite occurs in beds among the volcanic rocks of Antrim near Ballymena and Larne in Northern Ireland.

The major bulk of non-ferrous metals indispensable for Britain's economy is imported.

Non-Metallic Minerals

A great variety of non-metallic minerals is produced in Britain. Various common rocks are mined for building purposes, heavy constructional work and for road-making, as in the case of granites in Devon, Cornwall and Aberdeenshire, and basaltic rocks in Northumberland, Shropshire and parts of the Scottish Lowlands. Sandstones and limestones have for centuries been used for the construction of houses. Limestone is used also in the chemical and iron and steel industries, as well as to provide lime for fertilizers, for road-making and also for cement manu­facture. The Pen nines are especially rich in sandstones and limestones, and Yorkshire and Lancashire are the leading quarrying counties.

Deposits of clay, especially in the Bedford and Peterborough areas, are important in the manufacture of bricks, while slates in Cumberland and North Wales have been extensively quarried as roofing materials. Fireclay, often found under coal seams, is used for making bricks suitable for lining furnaces.

Chalk is used in the cement industry and is mined on both banks of the Thames estuary, the South Downs and on the banks of the Humber.

Sand and gravel for the building industry generally come from pits which are fairly widespread throughout midland and northern England and central Scotland, and on the river terraces in the Midlands and southern England. Certain special varieties of sand are used in the glass-making industry, and these are concentrated in Bedfordshire, Norfolk and Lancashire.

Kaolin, a fine, white china-clay, occurs in Cornwall and Devon. It is shipped for use in cotton, paper and pottery manufacture.

Common salt and rock salt form the basic raw materials for a variety of chemicals essential, for example, in the textile and soap-making industries, so they have their chief market in the chemical industry.

Important area of the concentration of common and rock salts are Cheshire, Worcestershire and Teesside. Deposits which exist 24 — 26 m below the surface repre­sent the site of an inland sea in former geological times, the waters of which have long since been evaporated.

Certain other less common minerals are also obtained in Britain, although in smaller quantities: gypsum occurs in semicrystalline form and is used to pro­duce plaster of Paris and alabaster. Potash has been proved to exist in workable quantities in North Yorkshire. Peat is widespread on upland moors or lowland fens and dug for fuel. The main peat areas are the Central Plain, Donegal and the western peninsulas of Ireland. It is now being used for the generation of electricity, but is still used domestically in North-West Scotland, the Southern Uplands and the Cheviots.

A brief survey of the natural resources of Great Britain reveals the absence here of many minerals which are important for the development of a number of branches of modern economy.

Water

Britain's water supplies are obtained partly from surface sources such as mountain lakes, streams impounded in upland gathering grounds and river intakes, and partly from underground sources by means of wells, adits and boreholes.

Conclusion

Speaking about geographical position, The British Isles consist of two large islands – Great Britain and Ireland – separated by the Irish Sea, and a lot of small islands, the main of which are the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, Anglesea and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, the Hebrides – a group of islands off the north-western coast of Scotland, and two groups of islands lying to the north of Scotland: the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands.

The surface of Great Britain varies greatly. The northern and western part of the country is mountains and is called the Highlands. All the rest (south, east and centre) is a vast plain which is called the Lowlands. The mountains are not very high. The coastline of Great Britain is greatly indented, especially in the west and north-west where the mountains come close to the coast. The rivers are not long. The rivers of Great Britain are not very long but usually deep and never freeze in winter. The longest and deepest rivers are the Severn and Mersey, the Thames on which stands the capital of Great Britain - London.

Lying in the middle latitudes and surrounded by waters Britain has a mild and temperate climate. The climate of the British Isles is generally classified as cool, temperate, though in the Highlands of Scotland it is severe. The best season for the English people is spring when everything is in full bloom, there is much sunshine and it is rather warm. Autumn and winter are famous for their fogs and rains. In big industrial cities fog turns into "smog" (smoke + fog). It is a very unpleasant time. The usual tempera­ture in winter very seldom falls below 3-5 degrees Centigrade. The fauna or animal life of Britain is much like that of north-western Europe, to which it was once joined.

Great Britain is not very rich in mineral resources. Nevertheless it has not bad deposits of coal, and iron ore and vast deposits of oil and gas that were discovered in the North Sea. Britain is a major world producer of oil, natural gas and coal. It’s self-sufficient in energy and in other resources.

In conclusion, I want to say that Great Britain is a highly developed industrial country with picturesque nature. I haven’t been to England yet and I’d like to visit this magnificent country very much.

Literature

1.      Голицынский Ю.Б. Великобритания – СПб.: КАРО, 2003.

2.      Паволоцкий В.М. Discovering Britain – СПб.: КАРО, 2003.

3.      Барановский Л.С., Козикис Д.Д. Panorama of Great Britain – М.: Высшая школа, 1990.

4.      Mikhailov N.N. English Cultural Studies – M.: Academia, 2003.

5.      http://www.coolsoch.ru/arh/angl/595.htm

6.      http://www.fos.ru/foreign/8204.html

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