Nineteeth Century Oil Exploration in North Carolina

North Carolina has an abundance of mineral resources. Gold, uranium, copper and coal have been found and successfully extracted at one time or another, as have precious stones such as rubies, emeralds and sapphires. One very valuable natural resource has eluded North Carolinians—petroleum. Despite millions of dollars invested in searching for this valuable resource from the shadow of the Blue Ridge in the west to the abyssal depths of the Manteo Exploration Unit off the Outer Banks to the east, no one has yet discovered a commercially viable oil field in the rock formations underlying the Old North State. I attempt to correct many of the misconceptions that prevail concerning the early attempts to discover oil in North Carolina by discussing early efforts to locate oil here, and examine what was learned at a relatively early period about the potential for extracting petroleum from the Triassic Age rock formations of the Piedmont region of the state.

The significance of aesthetic landscape appreciation to modern geotourism provision

Many of the stakeholders involved in modern geotourism provision lack awareness of how the concept essentially ermeged, developed and was defined in Europe. Such stakeholders are unaware of how many of the modern approaches to landscape promotion and interpretation actually have nineteeth century antecedents. Similarly, many of the apparently modern threats to, and issues around, the protection of wild and fragile landscapes and geoconservation of specific geosites also first emerged in the ninetheeth century; the solutions that were developed to address those threats and issues were first applied in the early twentieth century and were subsequently much refined by the opening of the twenty-first century. However, the European engagement with wild and fragile landscapes as places to be appreciated and explored began much earlier than the nineteenth century and can be traced back to Renaissance times. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary consideration of this rather neglected aspect of geotourism, initially by considering its modern recognition and definitions and then by examining the English Lake District (with further examples from Britain and Australia available at the website) as a particular case study along with examples.