Andalucia is a province in Spain, at the far south west of Europe. Its long and varied human history has seen it linked to the middle East, north Africa and the Americas. The creation of these links brought new foods, metals, diseases: new stuff into Andalucia. Sometimes the impact of arrival created ripples that reached… Continue reading Andalucia: a history of stuff
Category: mountains
Telling stories about Irish Geology
I clearly remember the most important moment of my geological career. I was resting my back on a glacially-polished wall of gabbro, my feet in an Irish bog, talking to myself in the sunshine. As a young man with bushy hair and beard, tattered field gear, wellington boots and a battered rucksack held together by darning… Continue reading Telling stories about Irish Geology
The Grampian / Taconic orogeny in Ireland – when arcs attack
Ever since the plate tectonic paradigm-shift of the 1960s, geologists have strived to understand ancient rocks in terms of the movements of plates. The geology of north-western Ireland can be explained by what happened when a subduction zone ran out of oceanic crust back in the Ordovician. Let me take you back to before that… Continue reading The Grampian / Taconic orogeny in Ireland – when arcs attack
Scandinavian crust now in Alaska!
The face of the earth is ever changing. Plate tectonics is slowly but surely rearranging the locations and inter-connections of continents. However knowing this in the abstract doesn’t prepare you for the awed surprise of discovering that a section of crust formed in Scandinavia is now found in Alaska. The evidence for this comes from… Continue reading Scandinavian crust now in Alaska!