Worbarrow Bay

View of the cliff in the Worbarrow Bay, taken from one place to the field names Gold Down. The view direction is northwest about. In the upper part of the picture on the far left the Bay of Arish Mell is seen. To the right of the rocks of Cow Corner, turn right next to the cliff of the ring Hill. Above Cow Corner, the screen background, the village Burngate. The whitish cliffs consist of limestones of the Upper Cretaceous ( " Chalk " ), the brownish cliff in the right center of the image consists mainly of sandstones of the Lower Cretaceous ( " Wealden ").

The Worbarrow Bay is a large, wide and shallow bay, east of Lulworth Cove on the peninsula Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, on the south coast of England.

Location

The Worbarrow Bay is located approximately six kilometers south of Wareham and about 16 kilometers west of Swanage. Worbarrow Bay is bounded on the east by the headland Worbarrow Tout and goes west to the Mupe Bay on with it, constitutes a kind of double bay. The western end of the Worbarrow Bay is known as Cow Corner.

Inland near the Worbarrow Bay, lies the ghost town and museum of Tyneham. The entire population of Tyneham was evacuated at short notice in December 1943 to make the army court, and was not allowed to return to this place again after the war. The Worbarrow Bay is only accessible when the Lulworth firing range is closed and the trails are so accessible to the public again. The bay can be achieved with a 1.4 -kilometer walk from the car park next to the village of Tyneham.

At the highest point of the cliff of Worbarrow Bay, where the hills ring Hill falls steeply to the sea, there is Flower's Barrow, where it is remains of an Iron Age fort, which would almost be but for the layman today at the ground surface visible. Moreover, already slipped about half of the ruins into the sea by coastal erosion and in the near future the rest of Flower's Barrow will disappear into the sea.

Jurassic Coast

The cliffs of the English Channel in East Devon and Dorset is one of the natural wonders of the world. From Orcombe Point in Exmouth, up to Old Harry Rocks is a 155 km long coastline, which has been declared as the first landscape in England by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site stretches.

The rock strata of the Jurassic Coast are tilted to the east. The geologically oldest rocks are therefore located in the westernmost section of this Küstengeotops. To the east, the median age of the rocks decreases gradually. The natural outcrops along the coast form a substantially continuous sequence, ranging from the Triassic deposits, on the Jurassic to those of the Cretaceous period and overall represents a geological period about 185 million years ago. The Worbarrow bay and Worbarrow Tout are part of the Jurassic Coast.

• See also list of places on the Jurassic Coast

Geology

The rock sequences in the Worbarrow Mupe Bay and Bay are very similar, reflected almost. At the western end of the bay Worbarrow, the cliff of Cow Corner and the ring Hill, a thick sequence of limestones of the Late Cretaceous Period is open, representing a continuation of the eastern cliffs of the Mupe Bay. The white chalk cliffs of the ring Hill dip steeply towards the water, and will be the gap in the cliff, which is formed by the Bay of Arish Mell in direction ( " Arish Mell Gap " ), lower. In addition to the Upper Cretaceous limestones the cliffs of the double bay contains layers of the Lower Cretaceous ( Upper Greensand and Gault clay and sandstone rich Wealden layers), the lithologically diverse Purbeck layers that extend down from the lower Cretaceous to the Upper Jurassic, and the Portland Stone formation of the upper Jurassic.

The cliff in the Worbarrow and Mupe Bay is considered geologically structure, part of a large fold structure, called the Purbeck monoclinal. During the formation of this fold structure all sediment layers were erected so that they come up today with about 45 degrees in Worbarrow and up to 60 degrees in Mupe Bay. The layers were also rotated horizontally. Therefore, the chalk, here the geologically youngest rocks found on the back of Double Bay, whereas form the Purbeck strata and the Portland limestone, the oldest here rocks, the front of the Double Bay, in the form of small capes Worbarrow Tout in East and the Mupe Rocks in the West. So that means that here the layers from north to south are younger and thus deviate from the general pattern at the on the Jurassic Coast, after which the layers from west to east are younger.