Half-day Workshop
With the assistance of North Sea Core (a local company that provides core for educational use, rescuing it from destruction), participants in this workshop will be travelling through the depositional history of the North Sea by looking at cores from a wide variety of depositional settings and ages. We start at the Devonian, when the North Sea was a warm place with lots of alluvial systems draining the Caledonian mountains. We then make our way to tropical Carboniferous landscapes and dryland Permian environments to arrive at the Triassic when widespread fluvio-lacustrine deposits were deposited throughout most of the North Sea area. The Jurassic marks the onset of the basin experiencing some stress, with volcanism, deep-water sedimentation and clasts tumbling off steep fault-bounded margins as a result. The Cretaceous is a little quieter with nice and clear semi-tropical seas, only to be experiencing a massive dump of sand and mud when the Uk landmass is uplifted from the west as the Atlantic opens. All told by the rocks themselves!
Cores through the world-famous Rhynie Chert Devonian hot-spring site (with Earth’s best preserved early terrestrial ecosystem) that are part of the University of Aberdeen collections will also be seen.