Hot potato
Geologists often get brought “strange objects” – most of which turn out to be not strange at all. However…
Joe McCall writes: A friend recently brought to me a strange pebble, picked up near Germany’s border with the Netherlands. It consisted of a flat, tabular core of brown flint, about two centimetres long, surrounded by black flint. The core was probably not an artefact and the assemblage likely represented a two-stage concretion, originally within chalk, but later tumbled in a river. So far, so ordinary.
However, Eric Robinson adds an interesting historical postscript. During the first World War, the Germans used such black flints to construct pill-boxes on the Western Front. Such black flints come from the Rhine system; the Scheldt system (in Belgium) does not carry them. This gave rise to doubts about the supposed neutrality of the Netherlands. True, they might have been sourced from the German stretches of the Rhine, but would the Germans transport aggregates over such large distances to the front? Could the flints have been purchased from the “neutral” Netherlands?