A beautifully illustrated field guide to Ireland's geology, which is both varied and spectacular.

This book contains a comprehensive field guide, including detailed itineraries and supporting data, to the Geology of Western Ireland, a classic site for world geology. It facilitates study into the rock record of the Neoproterozoic ‘birth’ to the Devonian ‘death’ of the Iapetus Ocean along the Laurentian (North American) margin. The enormous variety of lithologies and processes available for study in this spectacularly exposed region include: fluviatile to deep-sea sediments; layered ultramafic intrusions to reverse zoned granite batholiths; zeolite to eclogite facies metamorphic assemblages; continental rifting; subduction processes; island arc evolution; arc-continent collision; Andean margin development; and continent-continent collision. An introduction to the geology, that includes information relevant to the planning and execution of field trips in the region, is followed by nine chapters each providing the necessary background, field itineraries, exercises and points for debate, covering: the Laurentian basement and Neoproterozoic cover of North Mayo, Sligo, the Ox Mountains and Connemara; the metamorphic nappes and syn-orogenic intrusions of the Ordovician Grampian Orogeny; the Cambro-Ordovician subduction-accretion complex of Clew Bay; the obducted Ordovician fore-arc basin of South Mayo; the post-subduction flip late-Ordovician of South Connemara; the Silurian successor basins deformed during the final closure of the Iapetus Ocean; the late to post-orogenic Devonian sediments; the Devonian Granite batholiths ; and the post-orogenic Carboniferous cratonic sediments. Two final chapters summarise: the current tectonic interpretation of this region; areas for future research; and the extensive sources of geochemical and geophysical data.

From the White Cliffs of Dover to The Old Man of Hoy, from the Giant's Causeway to the peaks of Snowdonia, some of the world's most striking and varied landforms are found in Britain and Ireland. Award winning landscape photographer Fran Halsall has chosen one hundred places which tell the story of how these Isles were made. Arranged in order of their formation, from the three billion year old summits of Scotland's far north west, to Chesil Beach's shingle shore, astounding images and accessible text tell of volcanic eruptions, the collision of continents and aeons of deposits, erosions and upheavals, as well as the ways in which the landscapes of the British Isles have defined and been defined by countless generations.