Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Pompeii and Vesuvius as part of a tour of the volcanoes of the Tyrrhenian Sea (here). Looking back through these photos, I am still amazed at the level of destruction of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and yet the immense force of destruction also provided […]
A few weeks ago, I took a pseudo-holiday with the family to the eastern Pyrenees. The Pyrenees offers many (if not most) of the features seen in large collisional orogenies (e.g. Alps and Himalaya) but on a much smaller scale. Because of this, much of our understanding of orogenic basins and reactivated orogenic basement come […]
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join a friend in a single prop plane to some key geologic localities that can be observed from the air better than they can be seen from the ground. While most of us use Google Earth for that, seeing an oblique view from 2-3 thousand […]
In addition to the famous angular unconformity seen near Lochranza on the Isle of Arran, Hutton also made an important discovery concerning the emplacement of plutonic systems. The Isle of Arran is cored by a large circular granitic pluton. This Tertiary-age pluton is rimmed by the steeply dipping Dalradian Supergroup and the Old Red Sandstone. […]
The Isle of Arran is often described as Scotland in miniature. It has it all: sheep, highland cattle, smoked fish, haggis, whiskey, cheese, and rocks. As for the rocks, Arran offers some of the best of Scottish geology contained on a 160 square mile island off the coast of the Firth of Clyde. Clockwise […]
