IV. Answer the questions.

1. Give the definition of weather and climate.

2. Which factors determine the climate of Great Britain?

3. Examine the moderating effect of the ocean on air temperature in winter and in summer.

4. Describe the major factors which make the British climate.

5. Describe the major features of the distribution of mean seasonal rainfall and temperatures in the British Isles.

6. Which areas of Britain have the greatest mean annual temperature range, and which areas the least? Can you suggest reasons for these differences?

7. Explain why Britain has very variable weather, commenting on seasonal changes.

8. Do you believe that the amount of rainfall in Britain is really exaggerated?

Points for discussion

1. Show how far the advantages deriving from the climate and weather of the British Isles outweigh the disadvantages.

2. What do you understand by the statement: "It is frequently said that Great Britain does not experience climate, but only weather"?

3. Why do the Englishmen talk so much about the weather?

Mineral Wealth

The rise of Britain as an industrial nation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was partly due to the presence of considerable mineral resources. They provided raw materials as well as sources of power. She possessed abundant supplies of coal and iron ore, the two chief minerals on which the Industrial Revolution was based.

B ritain 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 had 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 been one increasingly orientated towards lighter industry, and the heavier coal-based industries have tended to decrease 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. Coal has been worked in Britain for 700 years. It was first obtained on a commercial scale as far back as the 13th century, mostly in North-East England, from sites where the coal seams actually came out to the surface and where the nearby rivers or coast provided a means of transport. 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.

Great Britain possessed the richest and most accessible coalfields containing the best coal of any world region. Traditionally Britain is a coal-exporting country. In the early years of this century coal production exceeded demands and huge quantities were exported. The record year was 1913 when 287 million tons of coal were mined, of which 73 million tons were exported.

The most important coal deposits are to be found in such industrial regions as Yorkshire, Lancashire, North-East England, the Midlands, South Wales and Central Scotland.

Most coal comes from Yorkshire and the Midlands, which produce about 60 per cent of British output. These fields are the easiest to mine because the coal seams are particularly thick.

However, with the introduction of new sources of power and fuel the production of coal has decreased considerably and constitutes at present about 100 million tons. Although many good seams of coal have now been worked out due to the early development of the industry, total coal reserves in Britain are estimated at 190,000 million tons, which are sufficient for at least three hundred years at the present rate of consumption.

OIL and GAS. As the importance of coal has declined, oil has become of increasing significance. 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. The first oil was brought ashore in 1975.

T he production of oil has risen fast, amounting in 1987 to 123 million tons, and for the first time the United Kingdom became an oil exporting nation.

The most important offshore oilfields are to be found off the coasts of eastern and northern Scotland and north-east England. By the 1990s over 40 fields produced oil, the largest of them being Brents Forties, Ekofisk and others. The principal oil producing area lies between the latitudes of the Tyne and Shetland Islands, but known to extend to the latitudes of Iceland. About two thousand kilometres of submarine pipeline have been built to bring ashore oil from the North Sea oilfields.

Today Great Britain is completely self-sufficient in oil but, in spite of this, the location of the oil refining industry still reflects the period when the country depended fully on imports. The principal refineries inevitably have coastal locations: Milford Haven, the Thames estuary, Southampton, Merseyside, Grangemouth, etc.

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. In the 1960s, however, several discoveries of natural gas were made on the continental shelf off the east coast of Britain, in the bed of the North Sea. Natural gas usually occurs with petroleum, and much of the world output comes from oilfields. A large-scale off­shore gas production in Britain began in 1967. In the 1990s home-produced natural gas accounted for about 80 per cent of total natural gas consumption, the remainder coming from Norway and Algeria. The North Sea gas from the continental shelf comes mainly from such major gasfields as Leman Bank, Hewett, Viking and others. The gas is being pumped ashore by pipelines laid on the seabed.

Like oil, natural gas is a valuable material for the chemical industry and demand for it is likely to increase consider­ably. Of all the major manufacturing industries, the chemical industry has shown the most rapid growth in recent years.

IRON ORE. Iron ore is one of the most abundant metals in the earth's crust. The total reserves of it in Britain are estimated at 3,800 million tons. But only those rocks are considered worthy of exploitation as iron ores, which contain (by weight) 25 per cent or more iron.

Most of the iron fields in Britain are to be found in the areas of major coalbasins, and this created favourable conditions for the development of metallurgical industry, especially at early stages of its history. By about 1,850 most of the best iron ores had been worked out, but the demand for iron ore was greater than ever — for making railway lines, locomotives, ships, machinery, bridges, and for constructional purposes generally.

As the metallurgical industry expanded, the failing supplies of domestic iron ore could no longer keep pace with the demands for the production of iron and steel. At the beginning of the 1990s Britain could produce only 300 thousand tons a year, while her annual consumption was about 32 million tons. So, practically all the iron ore for the metallurgical industry of the country is imported, mainly from Sweden, North and West Africa, Spain, Canada and South America.

Great Britain has no large-scale sources of non-ferrous metals. Nearly all of them — manganese, tin, copper, zinc — are imported too.

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 and Cornwall. Deposits of clay are important in the manufacture of bricks. Chalk is used in the cement industry and is mined on both banks of the Thames estuary and on the banks of the Humber. Sand and gravel for the building industry generally come from pits which are widespread throughout midland and north­ern England and central Scotland.

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

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

Certain other less common minerals are also obtained in Britain, although in smaller quantities: gypsum, potash, peat.

Comprehension Check