The idea for blogs of the Geology of the Tour de France was born out of combining two passions: geology and cycling.
Geoscientists tend to love the outdoors, and are a talkative bunch who can’t stop explaining about their rocks, fossils, landscapes, and natural processes, and the field expeditions they undertook. At some point I realized that viewers of live coverages of cycling races like the Tour de France watch hours and hours of geological excursions. Surely, we couldn’t let the opportunity pass to geo-monologue! And these races are covered by commentators that explain just about everything that passes the camera. All we had to do is help the commentators to explain a few things about the landscape and underlying hidden treasures. As it turns out, there are quite a few geoscientists who love cycling and watching the race, and quite a few cyclists with a keen interest in the environment. GeoTdF was born.
This web page is dedicated to the Geology of the Tour de France. But on the Twitter account @geotdf, we can’t help ourselves and tweet about the geology of just about every race where we find something to tell you. So if you want your regular geo-fun fact, follow us, and drop your questions should you have any! We hope you enjoy, and we’ll see you on the road!