[2] When he was thirteen and at Bootham School[3][4] in York he discovered a near complete skeleton of Steneosaurus Brevior, an 11 foot long crocodile fossilized in the Jurassic rocks of the North Yorkshire coast, which was removed to the Natural History Museum, London.

[7] After graduating, he started on a PhD at Cambridge to investigate the deep structure of eastern England, using explosion seismology;[8] this ended with the outbreak of the Second World War.

During this time, he spent two summers at the Bailie School in Shandan, Northwest China, advising the industrial co-operative there on natural resources.

He pioneered the incorporation of fieldwork as a regular part of the Cambridge curriculum: and from 1952 for more than 30 years, led some 2000 students, on Arran fieldtrips.

Here young scientists were trained to look at rocks in situ and make simple observations, and then to argue about what they saw ignoring all preconceptions.

He saw the geological potential of Svalbard for both research and educational work with its superb rock exposures showing a more or less complete stratigraphic succession from late Precambrian to the Palaeogene.

Svalbard proved an excellent training ground for future geologists producing around thirty PhD theses and over three hundred scientific papers.

Early fieldwork involved transport in small open boats, man hauled sledges and much pack carrying to the study area, using primitive equipment and often in harsh conditions.

Expeditions from 1949 to 1960 spent much effort on a simultaneous geological and topographical survey using map triangulation to fix the position of mountain tops.

Local successions of rock units and fossils were described and correlations made in accord with the developing stratigraphic standards, providing the data for geotectonic interpretation and historical synthesis.

The objective was field and literature based geological investigations into key aspects of the whole Arctic and surrounding areas, financed by subscriptions from the oil and gas industry.

From his 1949 expedition onwards he operated a universal system for numbering localities, samples and photographs, and this provided the central basis for much collaborative work.

A sophisticated information database, developed out of Harland's extensive library and filing systems, provided the cornerstone of literature based research for CSE and CASP.

[28] Harland was keen on continental drift since reading Alfred Wegener as a schoolboy and advocated the theory in a talk to his school as a 15 year old.

[31] As a member of staff after the war, when the majority opinion was still opposed to it, he told students to keep an open mind:[32] by 1964 models favouring continental drift became widely accepted.

At the 1964 Royal Society two day Symposium on Continental drift, Harland presented research on the tectonic evolution of the Arctic North Atlantic region.

[36] Over the following decades, Harland and colleagues used field data for developing models describing Svalbard's terranes and fault systems, which were important in understanding the tectonic evolution of the North Atlantic Region.

With his student Derek Bidgood he made the first attempt, in 1958, to examine the palaeomagnetism of Precambrian glacial deposits, using rock samples collected in Greenland and Norway.

[38] This contributed to his postulation that there had been a major Precambrian ice-age, with ice sheets or floating icebergs carrying the erratic blocks now embedded in the tillite, extending over most or all of the globe.

[39][40] Harland argued that there had been severe global glaciations in late Precambrian times and the evidence he presented was to form the foundations of Snowball Earth theory.

[42] He collaborated with palaeontologist Martin Rudwick, who described how an episode of almost glacial global conditions had been followed by an altered climate and environment which made possible the proliferation of animal life in Cambrian times.

It was not until the 1990s that the idea was more generally accepted, when Paul F. Hoffman and colleagues, argued that several such "Snowball Earth" episodes had occurred towards the end of Precambrian history.

His field work and research in Svalbard looked closely at the Hecla Hoek rocks, a great geosyncline and part of the complex sedimentation belts of Europe, Greenland, and America.

The ancient ocean Iapetus, existed before Devonian times, between 600 and 400 million years ago, and its closure caused the deformation of bordering geosynclines and the formation of the Arctic Caledonides.

[56] Some 60,000 specimens of rocks, fossils and core samples collected during the Cambridge Svalbard period are now in the care of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences.

Most of the expedition records are organized on the twinlock filing system – and include administrative papers, logs of each party, bulletins, accounts, as well as specimen, station, negative, and photograph catalogues, and copies of field notes.