From the highest sheer cliffs in Britain to the best ‘hands on’ exposure of the Great Glen Fault, Shetland is packed with an incredibly varied geology spanning almost 3 billion years.
You can walk on an ancient ocean floor, explore an extinct volcano and stroll across shifting sands, all in the space of a day. Along the way you will discover some of the most stunning scenery in the UK and find out how our geology has influenced every part of life in Shetland.
To help you understand the geology of Shetland it's useful to think of the archipelago as a giant geological ‘jigsaw’ consisting of four huge blocks of the Earth’s surface known as terranes (see image and link below).
Assembly of the ‘jigsaw’ took hundreds of millions of years and each piece had a different geological history before they all came together. By exploring Shetland’s amazing geo-diversity you discover how it relates to other parts of the globe.
Three of the jigsaw pieces also form northern Scotland. Two of these formed the roots of a vast mountain chain of Himalayan proportions, which formed about 420 million years ago, during an event known as the Caledonian Orogeny.
The remains of these mountains have been identified in western Norway, eastern Greenland, Scotland, Northern Ireland and eastern North America.
