I'm at Urquhart Castle, on Loch Ness, in the Highlands of Scotland. This whole area is
part of the Great Glen Fault -- which runs north-east to south-west, from the North Sea,
through Inverness, across Scotland in an almost straight line, forming Loch Ness, then all
the way across the Irish Sea and into Ireland. It's a transcurrent fault, two bits of the
earth sliding sideways against each other.
This is the middle of the Highlands, the mountains that stretch across Scotland and all the way
up Norway: the same mountain range, formed when continents collided nearly 400 million
years ago. This was before Pangaea, the giant supercontinent, all the land on Earth in one
place -- that would form a hundred million years later, and these would be the Central
Pangaean Mountains. The timescales we're talking about are incomprehensible to humans.
But Pangaea eventually split up. Land continued to move, at roughly the same rate your fingernails
grow. And over this unimaginably long time, this mountain range was split. Not just by
the North Sea between here and Scandinavia, but by the slowly-forming Atlantic Ocean.
Look at Newfoundland, in the north-east of Canada: you'll see the same features, and
the same north-east to south-west line of the Great Glen Fault. Canada and Scotland
are separated by an ocean and still slowly moving apart, but they were once connected.
The fossils and geology match. These mountains, these gorgeous mist-shrouded Scottish mountains:
they're also the Appalachians, the chain that runs through the southern United States.
Now, there's been a lot of erosion and uplifting since --
happens in the best part of half a billion years, but once upon a time they were one and the same.
The Scottish Highlands and the Appalachians are the same mountain chain,
literally an ocean apart.
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