Pangaea, geology stylee

Following the Pangaea Day geoblogosphere meme, started by Chris@goodSchist and followed up by Callan@Nova, Brian@clastic detrius and Chris@highly allochtonous I suppose I should give it a go.

This was harder that I thought. I’m still not sure I’ve got it perfectly correct (I may be a touch too far north) but I think that Britain was under the red dot on this version of Ron Blakey’s palaeogeographic map for the Late Triassic (220Ma).

In the Triassic things are happening fast. The Variscan mountains of the late Carboniferous / Early Permian to the south have all but disappeared and extension related to the opening of the North Atlantic is causing rapid subsidence. The Bakevellia Sea is to the west and the Zechstein Sea to the east in the Permo-Triassic with a possible connection north to the Boreal Ocean. As subsidence occurs, by Late Triassic / Early Jurassic these seas link up and most of Britain becomes shallow marine with a number of small islands just remaining.

The Faroe-Rockall Basin forms to the west forming the start of the North Atlantic rift. If it had come down the failed Viking Graben rift to the east things would have been very different for us.

~ by hypocentre on May 12, 2008.