Scotland

Scotland has a long and fascinating geological history. It has taken almost 3000 million years and a journey across the globe from the South Pole, riding along on the Earth's tectonic plates.

Map of the world, showing a trail that Scotland may have taken on the contential drift

Forming the landscape beneath our cities, rivers, lochs, soil and vegetation lie many different rock types that are Scotland’s building blocks. Each rock type tells its own story – how it was formed, when it was formed and even where it was formed. By using these stories as clues to the past, geologists have been able to piece the episodes of Scotland's geological history together.

During those 3000 million years, the land has seen many geographical, topographical and climatic changes, as well as seeing life evolve from algae and bacteria, to sea life, then land life, to the dinosaurs and to the development of the human race.

In the past, Scotland has been a desert, a tropical swamp, a volcanic landscape, an ocean floor and has been witness to countless ice ages. We know this from the rocks that are all around us and beneath our feet.

When the geological time scale was first developed, geologists used the existence of these different conditions to divide up the vast expanse of time into relative sub-divisions. There is a hierarchy of sub-divisions that has developed over the decades, from hundreds of millions of years, down to hundreds of thousands of years. Most of the smaller sub-divisions (younger than 545 million years) are now based on the appearance and disappearance of certain species of fossils.

The time scale covers the important divisions that are most commonly used. Using this time scale, Scotland's exciting journey can be described. http://www.scottishgeology.com/geology/scotland_through_time/timeline_intro.html