Steph is a Ph.D. student at Royal Holloway working with Matthew Thirlwall (see her research profile here and blog here). Shetland lies around 150km north of mainland Scotland and has spectacularly diverse geology for such a small archipelago. This is one of the main reasons I chose to undertake a masters, and now PhD trying to understand […]
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 […]
The northwest coast of Scotland is an incredibly geologically diverse stretch of coastline. In less than 150 kilometers the rocks span over 2.8 billion years of Earth history, from the Archaean Lewisian gneiss to the Tertiary volcanic province on Skye with little missing in between. Such a wide temporal spread means that any particular age […]
In the world of geology, many firsts took place in Scotland. Scotland was the place where deep time was first demonstrated by James Hutton at Siccar Point (discussed here). It as also the birthplace of thrust tectonics. However, these tremendous discoveries were not without controversy. Loch Eriboll A prominent feature in the highlands is […]
