Limestones, Climate Change and Scepticism

The broad theme of my back-packing trip last year was to move around the northern rim of the Mediterranean (and visit a few of its islands along the way). During much of that trip, limestone was in my face. I trekked over it in the Albanian Alps, trained through it in the Austrian Alps, climbed it at Žabljak in Montenegro, and wandered over forest-covered limestone in the Balkans National Park and visited archaeological sites built of it in Greece, Sardinia and Malta (the featured image is Dwejra Point on Malta). On other trips I’ve swum over limestone on the Croatian coast, wandered over it in the United Arab Emirates and Iran, and I’ve worked on it in central Turkey. Limestone gives so much character to that huge region, it could be named after it — ‘Limestonia’ or something. By and large, this huge extent of limestone was formed in the shallow seas of an ocean that once extended from the Mediterranean through to the Middle East. It has been called the Tethys, and the modern Mediterranean is essentially its much smaller progeny. <a href="https://medium.com/@mikepole/limestones-climate-change-and-scepticism-40f797a2d63a">Read More</a>