I need to find geological history of pease bay on the east coast 30 or 40km south of edinburgh?

Question

i need to find geological history of pease bay on the east coast 30 or 40km south of edinburgh. Im interested in igneous interactions,timescale of sedimentary rock formation, where and when (geologically speaking) these events took place. I understand basics and relise scotland was not where it is now when some of the early events that shaped the deposits happened.Can anyone help me locate a free website or free guide so i can learn more about the site.One of the founders of modern geology did a lot of research there and I would like to find out a lot more.

Answer 1

You are looking for what is more commonly known as "Hutton's Unconformity" at Siccar Point, North Berwickshire.  It's adjacent to Pease bay. See the links below for details.  At this location, very ancient metamorphic rocks (Silurian slates, over 400 million years old) have been folded and tilted upright, and planed off by erosion, and are horizontally overlain by younger Devonian rocks (still pretty old, at some 300 million years old).  

The Silurian rocks were folded and metamorphosed by the so-called "Caledonian" Orogeny, a mountain building event of Himalayan proportions that through plate tectonic processes, brought parts of the European and North American plates into collision.  The eroded stumps and remnants of the resulting chain of mountains form the bulk of much of the Scottish Highlands, as well as Scandinavia and the Appalachian Mountains in eastern USA.  Bear in mind that Europe and North America split apart again along similar lines much later in geological time, during the late Cretaceous to Palaeocene some 50 million years ago.

Hutton was an outstanding geologist working in the late 1700's.  Studying the rocks at this location, he was able to grasp the enormity of geological processes and geological time, even if he could not quantify it.  This was Hutton's great insight. Bear in mind that at this time, nearly everyone believed in the Biblical version of creation in seven days; the theory of evolution was still decades away, and radioactivity, let alone radiometric dating techniques had not been discovered.

In a 1788 paper Hutton presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Hutton remarked, "we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." He later published his thoughts in a "Theory of the Earth" although his ideas were widely ridiculed and not accepted until many years later.

Answer 2

grpr1964's answer pretty much covers it, but if you're doing this for a paper or something like that it would look bad for you to cite wikipedia.

http://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/k_home.h...

http://www.geologyglasgow.org.uk/

These sites will be able to provide you the same data, but from a more reliable source.