Ballard Cliff is part of the

Jurassic Coast The Jurassic Coast, also known as the Dorset and East Devon Coast, is a World Heritage Site on the English Channel coast of southern England. It stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about , and was ins ...

near

Swanage Swanage () is a coastal town and civil parish in the south east of Dorset, England. It is at the eastern end of the Isle of Purbeck and one of its two towns, approximately south of Poole and east of Dorchester, Dorset, Dorchester. In the Unit ...

in the

Isle of Purbeck The Isle of Purbeck is a peninsula in Dorset, England. It is bordered by water on three sides: the English Channel to the south and east, where steep cliffs fall to the sea; and by the marshy lands of the River Frome, Dorset, River Frome and Poo ...

Dorset Dorset ( ; Archaism, archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north and the north-east, Hampshire to the east, t ...

, England. The steeply dipping

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 143.1 to 66 mya (unit), million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era (geology), Era, as well as the longest. At around 77.1 million years, it is the ...

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Ch ...

that marks the northern end of Swanage Bay takes over from the

Wealden beds The Wealden Group, occasionally also referred to as the Wealden Supergroup, is a group (a sequence of rock strata) in the lithostratigraphy of southern England. The Wealden group consists of paralic to continental (freshwater) facies sedimentar ...

at this location. A series of landslides during the late 1990s and early 2000s created a prominent white 'zig-zag' in the scarp. A rotational slip in the Chalk,

Upper Greensand Greensand or green sand is a sand or sandstone which has a greenish color. This term is specifically applied to shallow marine sediment that contains noticeable quantities of rounded greenish grains. These grains are called ''glauconies'' and co ...

and

Gault The Gault Formation is a geological formation of stiff blue clay deposited in a calm, fairly deep-water marine environment during the Lower Cretaceous Period (Upper and Middle Albian). It is well exposed in the coastal cliffs at Copt Point in Fo ...

has developed, exposing a section of the soft, blue-grey Gault clay at the base of the cliff.

External links

Ian West's ''Geology of the Wessex Coast'' Field Guide
including photographs Cliffs of England Jurassic Coast Geology of Dorset Isle of Purbeck {{Dorset-geo-stub

See also

External links