A great second day of our #Scotland #geology tour. Our first stop was the #rochemoutonnées of #dulnainbridge We then travelled to #lochness to look for Nessie and to learn about the Great Glen Fault. Interesting fact: Loch Ness holds more water than all the lakes in Wales and England put together! The next stop was #Lairg to learn about the #Lairgmeteorite It is possible that a gravity anaomly under Lairg is due to a meteor impact 1.2 billion years ago, and this impact is responsible for meteor impact ejecta that is found in sandstone on the Assynt coast (although a paper published this June suggests the crater may lie elsewhere......the jury is still out!) Then we entered the #UNESCO #Northwesthighlands #geopark We made several stops in the Geopark including the famous #knockancrag where geologists Benjamin Peach and John Horne resolved the "Highland Controversy" by identifying the world's first Thrust Fault - the Moine Thrust. The controversy existed because 1 billion year old metamorphic rock had been thrust over unmetamorphosed Cambrian sedimentary rock and the earlier geologists couldn't understand how that could be. Murchison and Gieke thought the overlying rock had to be slightly younger than the underlying rock, while James Nicol and Charles Lapworth thought that somehow older rock was indeed overlying younger rock. We also saw imbricated thrust faults and a dyke at Stronchrubie cliffs and an unconformity where 1 billion year old Torridonian sandstone lies unconformably on 3 billion year old Lewisian gneiss. We are spending the night in Lochinver. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzvtSKpJtz8/?igshid=1a80n9f37rtyg
