The island of Heligoland in the south-east corner of the North Sea. The formation itself is from the early Eocene geologic age and the polar regions may have been at least as mild as the modern-day Pacific Northwest. At the beginning of the period, Australia and Antarctica remained connected. Climates remained warm through the rest of the Eocene, although slow global cooling, which eventually led to the Pleistocene glaciations, started around the end of epoch as ocean currents around Antarctica cooled. At the beginning of the period, Australia and Antarctica remained connected, and warm equatorial currents mixed with colder Antarctic waters, distributing the heat around the world and keeping global temperatures high.

The northern supercontinent of Laurasia began to break up, as Europe, Greenland and North America drifted apart. Europe saw the Tethys Sea finally vanish, while the uplift of the Alps isolated its final remnant, the Mediterranean, and created another shallow sea with island archipelagos to the north. Though the North Atlantic was opening, a land connection appears to have remained between North America and Europe as the faunas of the two regions are very similar. India continued its journey away from Africa, and began its collision with Asia, folding the Himalayas into existence. The bed of the North Sea forms two basins, the main northern one lies to the north of a ridge between north Norfolk and Frisia. The southern basin, if not flooded, would now drain towards the Strait of Dover thence to the English Channel. During the Devensian glacial much of the northern basin was covered by the ice sheet and the remainder, including the southern basin was tundra. During the Würm, the Rhône glacier covered the whole western Swiss plateau, reaching today's regions of Solothurn and Aarau. In the region of Bern it merged with the Aar glacier. The Wisconsin or Wisconsinian was the last major advance of continental glaciers in North America, altered the geography of North America north of the Ohio River. Settlement throughout was unknown before arborous terrain.

The London-Brabant Island goes under a number of names such as London Island, London Platform, London-Brabant Massif, Wales-Brabant Massif or, in French texts, Anticlinal ardennais du Brabant, Terre de St-Georges et du Brabant or Bloc du Midland et du Brabant. It was an anticlinal ridge extending from the Rhineland to the sites of East Anglia and the middle Thames. In a sense, it still exists but in Britain, it is buried. It was part of the terrane, Avalonia.

The rocks of which it is formed are mainly of the Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian but the anticlinal folding came with the Caledonian Orogeny at the end of the Silurian and in the early Devonian, when the continent was drifting through the southern latitudes. As it passed through the dry latitudes represented today by the Namib Desert, it was eroded and the soils became Laterite represented by the Old Red Sandstone which shows its presence in the red soils of Devonshire. The Caledonian orogeny is a mountain building event recorded in the mountains and hills of northern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and west Norway. This event occurred during the Silurian and Devonian Periods of the Palaeozoic Era, roughly 444-416 Mya.

The Mesozoic Era is marked by the existence of a supercontinent, Pangaea, in which most of the land mass was conjoined into a single large continent surrounded by a single large ocean, Panthalassa. The Caledonian range already existed and was contiguous to the ancestor of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. The origin of the Caledonian range occurred earlier, during the assembly of Pangaea by the convergence of more ancient plates. In the preceding Ordovician Period, ca. 488-444 Mya, the largest continent, Gondwana, containing the plates of the future Africa, South America, and Antarctica, was located between the South Pole and the Equator. A second land mass, Laurentia, containing the future northeast section of North America, straddled the equator. To the northeast was the Siberian Plate, separated from Gondwana by the Palaeotethys Ocean; to the southeast, the Baltic Plate, or Baltica, separated from Gondwana by Iapetus Ocean. In the Iapetus Ocean was a long archipelago, Avalonia, containing New England, Nova Scotia and the British Isles. It was divided from Gondwana by an oceanic rift.

The period from which the island has exercised most influence on modern Europe was the Carboniferous. As the continent was drifting past the Equator, on the island's shores, there grew a rich tropical forest swamp. On the island's southern shore, it left the Dinantian / Avonian (Lower Carboniferous), Namurian and Westphalian coal fields of France and Belgium. To its north-west, it left those of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. These extend further east but at ever greater depth. At the modern east Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire coast for example, their upper surface is at about 2km depth. On the north Norfolk coast, the line of the Carboniferous shore roughly coincides with the modern one. By the Cretaceous the island had sunk much further in relation the sea level. Before the end of the period, the British end was buried in Upper Cretaceous chalk.

As the continent drifted northwards, away from the Equator, through the latitudes represented today by the Sahara desert, the erosion was renewed. This time, the lateritic soils are represented by the New Red Sandstone and the red soils of Leicestershire and Rutland during the Permian and Triassic. The early Permian was the time of the height of the Variscan earth movements as the crust to the south was crushed against the island. The great disturbances seen at the surface in Brittany, the Ardennes and the Rhineland also lie below the Paris Basin.

In the early Jurassic, the Rhaetic sea flooded much of the Permian plain. On the margin of the London-Brabant Island, the estuarine conditions which left the Lower Estuarine Series prevailed for a while before the sea rose so as to deposit the Lincolnshire Limestones before falling again so that the Upper Estuarine Series was left. Again the sea rose to deposit the Blisworth Limestone, the Blisworth Clay and the Upper Jurassic clays. The same general pattern occurred in France leaving the Paris Basin flooded from Anjou to Luxembourg.

During the Protoerozoic, there was an oxygen build-up on Earth. The first multi-cellular life was also formed. Classically, the boundary between the Proterozoic and the Paleozoic was set at the base of the Cambrian period when the first fossils of animals known as trilobites and archeocyathids appeared. In the second half of the 20th century, a number of fossil forms have been found in Proterozoic rocks, but the boundary of the Proterozoic has remained fixed at the base of the Cambrian -- currently placed at 542 Ma.