Members’ Night

The last evening meeting of the session will include the follolwing short presentations.

Angus Miller. The Scottish Geology Trust’s Geosites project

Scotland has over 1000 sites that are designated as important for geology and geomorphology at a national or local level, but the value and importance of these sites is often not recognised, it is hard to find information about them and systematic monitoring is under-resourced.

The Scottish Geology Trust’s Geosites project aims to bring information about all these sites together in one place, to make it easy for people to report issues with sites, and to share information. Working with partners, we propose to support a network of volunteers to visit sites and become ambassadors, available to help engage with local communities in learning and benefiting from their local geoheritage.

Ella Davis. Determining tectonic transport directions in the southern part of the Northern Highlands Terrain, Scotland

Ella is an MS student at Virginia Tech in the USA. She recently received a grant of £1000 from the society to help her with field work in northern Scotland, and she will give a presentation to us on her findings. The objective of her study was to determine the tectonic transport direction, shear senses and deformation temperatures in the southern part of the Northern Highland Terrain (NHT) of Scotland using optical microscopy-based petrologic, microstructural, and crystal fabric analyses. Previous studies have demonstrated that in the northern part of the NHT, tectonic transport changed from top to the north at 450-440 Ma in the high temperature core of the orogen to top to the west along the western foreland margin at 435 Ma (Law et al., 2021). However, no equivalent studies have been made of the southern NHT.