Web links for
Scottish Geology:
http://www.emory.edu/OXFORD/Library/Guide/scotlinks.htm:
A nice collection of web sites for Scottish Geology, Archaeology, and Weather
http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/arthurseat/geology/geology.html
A geologic guide to Holyrood Park in the midst of Edinburgh. We will have an opportunity to explore features made famous by James Hutton and John Playfair.
http://www.geologyshop.co.uk/fieldguides2.htm
Links to numerous virtual field trips throughout the British Isles.
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/essays/Hutton.htm
Want to see James Hutton’s original essay? Do you have a lot of patience?
http://www.glg.ed.ac.uk/courses/field/siccarpt/
If we have to miss Siccar Point because of Hoof and Mouth Disease, you can still still see it virtually at this site.
http://uk2.multimap.com/home.html
Interactive maps and aerial photographs of parts of the United Kingdom, including downtown Edinburgh and Holyrood Park
http://www.scot-borders.co.uk/footandmouth/index.htm - Foot and Mouth Disease information
http://www.myspace.co.uk/nessie/nessie/nessgeo.html Geological Notes on Loch Ness and the Great Glen Fault
http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/scotweather.html Scotland weather
http://www.metoffice.com/weather/europe/uk/ukforecast.html More Scotland weather
What
you need to know before we go:
Most of the common igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks will be seen during our journey, so some background in rock identification will be helpful.
We will be seeing and hearing about faults and folds, so learning about thrusts, reverse, and normal faults, as well as anticline and syncline folds will be useful.
Scotland has been the site of continental collisions and separations at numerous times in the past, so some background in plate tectonics would be to your advantage. An excellent on-line resource (in fact, the entire book) is found at the USGS site Dynamic Earth: http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/dynamic.html.
The geologic time scale is critical to understanding the flow of history. See the USGS page at http://geology.er.usgs.gov/paleo/geotime.shtml, or the on-line book Geologic Time, at http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/.