 And our speaker tonight is Mr David Webster. He's an accomplished speaker who's recently presented to the Geological Society of Glasgow using Zoom, so hopefully knows what he's doing. David Webster has a degree in geology from Oxford University and MSc from Stockholm and his work for many years in the oil industry. He's now actively retired and has built a house on Islay and is co-author of a guide to the geology of Islay. Please feel free to call yourself a wee driver if you favour Islay Whiskey while you enjoy tonight's lecture as David takes us on a guided excursion round the geology of Islay. So David, if I could please ask you to share your screen and unmute your microphone. The floor is all yours. Can everyone see my screen? Yes, I can. Okay, right. Well, welcome to Islay. We're going to do a quick tour of Islay. And we're going to throw a bit of history and archaeology into the mix just to sort of show how geology relates to all these other disciplines. And we'll have a bit of whiskey as well. There's a story between link between geology and whiskey, which I've really enjoyed exploring and researching. So have a look at that as we go along the. So I think everybody knows where Islay is. Southern Hebrides, nearest island of Scotland, Ireland. You can see Ireland quite well from Islay. You get to it on the ferry from Kenne Craig. And you can actually get there from Obern as well. So yeah, actually south of Glasgow, believe it or not, people think it's north, but it's not. It's actually south. So we're going to tour a wee bit of Islay. You have to start with a geological map. Everyone likes geological maps because they're beautifully coloured. Geologists always talk about rocks in age order. So when you see a column at the side of a geological map, hopefully it's an age order oldest at the bottom. We always start our stories at the beginning. And off we go looking at all the different rock colours in the geology. The oldest rocks in Ireland are in the west and the youngest rocks are in the southeast, which pretty much mirrors Scotland and pretty much mirrors the UK. The oldest rocks in the UK are in Paris and Lewis and the youngest rocks are in London. Islay is like a miniature version of that. So it's oldest over here and youngest over here. But it's all relative because these rocks here, the oldest rocks are about, and I'll talk a bit more about them in a minute, are about 1.8 billion years. Now the earth is 4.7 billion years. So these are quite old, but still half the age of the earth, bit less than half the age of the earth. And the rest of the island is round about 600 million years, between 800 and 600. So we're talking about the Precambrian. Those of you who understand a bit about the sort of periods of the earth. This is Precambrian before the major burst of life at the Cambrian. So these are all older rocks than 540, which is the beginning of the Cambrian. These are late Precambrian. These are quite early in the Precambrian. So we're looking at some rocks here and I'm going to move on to the next slide because I wanted to show you the old maps. These are the old sort of late Victorian surveyors, basically the whole team of the British Geological Survey surveyed the whole of British Isles and including a lot of Scotland, obviously, at the time. And these guys are just well known. These are these are our heroes, Charles Clough, Ben Peach. And they did a very with all their colleagues in the British Geological Survey produced this wonderful map in the in the very early part of the 20th century, and it is still a good map. There is they were observational scientists. They observed the natural landscapes. They were interested in describing things. And they just drew a beautiful map of of Isla and your and the rest of Scotland see the detail in this when you get into it. It's beautiful. So this is a, this is a nice map. I want to mention this guy as well. This guy, Battersby Bailey is famous for he did a sort of revised version of the map and brought it up to date for 1916. He was an eccentric character. This guy mapped Isla in short. He thought that long trousers would get to where he carved the toes of his shoes so that he wouldn't get wet feet. He tied everything to his body and his jacket with string and at his lunch before he left his accommodation, so he wouldn't have to carry it. And he did a fantastic resurvey of the map, but it didn't change it vastly, but he got the sort of structure, the structural details of the of the geology dead on and this map and his work still stands stead today. So we have a great regard for for Battersby Bailey's work in the very early part of the 20th century. Time we have to talk geological time I did mention about 1.8 billion years ago and we're going to talk about the early rocks of the, of what you see on Isla, around about 1.8 billion years. Then there's a big gap we call it the billion year gap before we actually get a lot of sedimentation that we're going to see that's around about the 600 700 800 million year, the late pre Cambrian, which is most of Isla, then lots of we we things happened right through the rest of the geological time up to the present sort of ice age that we're still in at the moment. So we're going to focus a bit on the rinse complex we're going to have a look at this rinse complex at the bottom of the of the column here, going to have a we look at this stuff here and have a quick look at the end about some of the stuff that happened later on in geological time so three key periods of time we're going to sort of investigate in three key areas of Isla. So here's a sort of Google Earth map of Isla, and we're going to head off to Brooklyn, which is where I've got my house I live over just here. So this is a bit I know quite well this is the rinse furniture people who know Isla would know this is the rinse it's almost an island there's a sort of neck of land low land here. The rest of the west and side of Isla is the rins, rest of it is the mainland bit, the towns of Bo More, Poteleon, and here in Padasque over here. We're glad he's a we we village dominated by distillery my house is up on the hill behind there. And a very pleasant place to start your geological tour of Isla by driving along here that we shop and you can stop here look at rocks. I thought it got out of the rock anyway so we've moved on to Portnáhaven I'm going to just, I've got a picture of a rock in a minute is coming up. There it is. Yes, sorry. This is should have come after the Brooklady slide because that Brooklady and at Portnáhaven, you see two key rocks in the rinse complex, a pink rock, and a sort of greeny black rock. These are the common rocks that we see on Isla at this part of the rinse complex. And if you go to any beach, you will find these red pebbles, and these greenish sort of blackish pebbles and they belong to these two rocks 70% of this rinse complex is made of this and it's a nice. And it's a sort of once was a sort of granite, a quartz poor granite called a cyanite, and it's been and it's got this sort of crude banding in it it's been metamorphosed and changed but it was originally an igneous molten rock called a cyan, cyanite, and it's now being nice night a nice a little bit more about that in a minute. And the other rock is a greenish rock that here used to be a basalt or a dollar right. It's now been metamorphosed, and it's now a meta dollar right or a meta Bay site, and it's sort of so you get these red rocks pinky red rocks and these sort of greeny brown, greeny black rocks. So the thinking of them as sort of like, like green apples and red apples but they're very, very common these pebbles and this is the predominant rocks in the rinse complex are these two rock types. We're going to move on I meant to show you something important haven but I've just in terms of time I'm going to just move on to loss at bay where this rinse complex is well exposed. And this is loss at bay it's one of my favorite favorite places on Eila. It's a beautiful bay on the West Coast, and we will have a quick look at some of the rocks you see down on the, on the south side of the bay here. And it's called the rinse complex for a very good reason because these rocks are complicated there are lots of rock types when I said it was simple. And there was just a pink one and the sort of greeny black one, well there's the greeny black one and that's the greeny black one there's the pink one. But there's a black one over here different black one a different black one here there's a fold in here there's all sorts of pink other pinky rocks here black rocks here. And it's a bit of a mess it's not nicely layered it's not structured very very difficult to sort of work out what's going on. And these are a whole bunch of rocks that have been what were once all igneous rocks they're all molten rocks at one stage in their lives. And they've been chewed up and nest about and recrystallized and partially melted and all turned into different things so they're igneous rocks that have been metamorphosed so we call them metat igneous rocks. And where did they form. Well, this is a classic sort of diagram that I drew my stuck in the book which was to do just to sort of illustrate the main principles of plate tectonics. With mid ocean ridges, creating oceanic crust, which is being destroyed in trenches. The the wet cold slab going down causes partial melting of the earth's mantle magma rises up and volcanoes appear in volcanic arcs or on continental crust they'll appear like the Andes or Japan. We believe that the rinse complex was formed at this sort of area here in the first crust, probably 30 or 40 kilometers down in the first crust underneath an active volcanic arc, which was forming at that time so 1.8 billion years ago. I love the bits of either we see today were formed in a in a volcanic arc. Formed on the edge of a continent. Now, this continent 1.8 billion years ago was called Columbia some of the literature calls it noona it seems to be interchangeable depending on which field and school you belong to is a map of Columbia and it's got the existing bits of Scotland this is NS is northern Scotland so northern Scotland existed this is this is a northern Highlands of Scotland and Lewis Harris they existed 1.8 billion years ago and we're a continent. This is the Baltic shield this is the core of the Baltic area. This is northern rock all this is Greenland. And this was the edge of the continent so imagine this is almost like the edge of Asia and this is Japan as a volcanic arc. This is sitting a high as the star. And these are volcanoes this is black dots here and this is a trench here a volcano an oceanic trench destroying the oceanic crust. And this, this was where the the rinse rocks were formed 1.8 billion years ago and we've called it the malin arc because it but the rocks stretch all the way from Greenland to Sweden. About 1.7 billion years ago I not long after but 100 million years later that arc had crashed into Columbia and we call it the creation complex because it's like added on to Columbia continents grow through plate tectonics they grow in a creek so when the we're getting more and more continental crust growing all the time as as plate tectonics continues to evolve the Earth's crust and create more church less dense continental crust out of the oceanic crust. We get these things happening all the time. But I live here and this is the southern part of Scotland here this is the Grampian terrain here which which has been moved by strike slip faulting and joined up with this subsequently but at that time it would have been well south of northern the southern part of rock or the drilling and the stretching samples on Rockwell show that the same rocks southern Greenland has the same rocks and southern Sweden and Norway have the same rock so this whole band of rock that we see on Eila actually has a lot of communities with Greenland Rock Hall and and and Sweden. And we think is Eila here right in the middle of this belt of rock here the Dalradian rocks which you're going to see in a minute and it's the basement it's the basement or we're geologists call often called the basement it's the oldest rocks you see that all the younger people have gone and the basement underneath the whole of Northern Ireland, the whole of Donnie Gaul northern Mayo, right up through Eila, a guy right through the Grampians right through the Cairngorms right up to Peterhead. If you drilled a hole anywhere in this area down deep enough, you would hit the rinse complex. It's underneath all of this area. Yeah, different rocks over here, the Great Glen fault and the Highland boundary fault our major terrain boundaries geological boundaries between different chunks of rock that accreted art went all the way along here, and then you could follow it out to rock all that way in Greenland and you can follow it this way into Sweden. So this is the little window is the only exposure we have we got a little tiny of rock rock outcrop here, just off Donnie Gaul initial and pretty much that's it there's a few bits over here but they're a bit changed in the in the over here. In the in Mayo, but basically, we don't see these rocks but only on Eila so it's a unique opportunity to see some really old rocks and the flooring at the floor a part of Scotland. Before I leave here, my first whiskey exploit here this is a whiskey story because this is the one of the few bottles of whiskey I know of perhaps the only one there is with a geological map on it. How do you produce this whiskey in 2017 2007 from a 1980 barrel. And they do this geological map on it. The reason and they called this, this particular expression the mayor of Eila, because the Eila is a place in Peru, and they invited the mayor of Eila in Peru to come to Brooklady to taste this whiskey and meet meet him here. At some point in time, they thought that the rocks of Eila, the rinse complex was very similar to rocks in Eila in Peru. In fact, here is a picture of Eila in Peru is got a nice on the coast has pink rocks and dark rocks, very similar rocks. This is their badge. This is, this is where it is in Peru. The mayor of Eila came to came to Eila to sample his upon this whiskey. And here's the map that's on the bottle. Yeah, and it sort of basically tried to illustrate the fact that at that time they thought that northern Scotland and Peru or that part of Gondwana in South America were joined up and Baltica was over here. It's a bit erroneous and that Baltica is actually neck. We are facing Baltica at the time because it's part the geology is much more like this than that. Although there are rocks of the same age as the rinse in Peru. They're not actually joined up. And there's a spring of water that comes out of these rocks that the distillers use to sort of dilute their whiskey from cast strength the bottling strength. And it becomes bubbling out of the rocks on the rinse complex so the 200 to 1.8 billion year old rock is producing a very weird spring that the local farmer is pumping out which supplies all the water for for the, all the water at the bottom is gin for their cutting whiskey cutting water for the whiskey from cast strength the bottling strength and it's also all the water. This special water is all the water used in the bottom is gin. Those of you sampled their wonderful gin. So we've filled this water geologically or chemically and we really what we've realized is this water, although it's quite soft it's still below pH of seven it's under picture six it's a little bit higher than the rest of the island waters which are very soft. But little bit little bit harder than Glasgow tap water in terms of its pH but it's got a very high silica content and this is a strange water to get because all the river water all the burns everything in there comes off the rain. It's got this. It will be just like this. These waters here the waters you get in the in the main distilleries for Gladys own bottling process water is is very soft and contains quite low silica and low alkalis as well, but the optimal spring is unusual. And we reckon it's because it's lies on a fault pattern and the faults cutting right through this rinse complex and I think what is a picture of the faults. Yeah, all these faults seem to sort of focus on this where this strange spring is the spring is sort of a previous picture or earlier picture it was next to the burn and the burns got pretty much rainwater in it with low silica and the spring has the high silica and it's probably because it's percolating through all these old crystalline rocks, which doesn't have a lot of carbonate in them but they have a lot of silica in them so there's a geological reason why this water is different. It's probably very old water and Brooklady make a nice marketing ploy out of this and it makes nice whiskey. So it's a good story, a good geological story for your for your for your whiskey. Yeah, I mean this is just summarizes the geology of that area because there's the band of rocks from Greenland into Baltico and Euler is and we think the Peru rocks are over here somewhere. Quite a long way away at the time on the 800 million years ago we reckon that that Amazonia was over here and the beginning of a split of this ancient continent called Rudinia which I'm going to talk a little bit more about in a minute. Yeah, this is the rocks that line up, we think now not the Peruvian rocks, but it's a good story and and the rock the water from the spring is very different geologically to the rest of Euler's water. So we've had a look at this. This is the rinse complex just sort of put the perspective. This is the these are the the nicest and the metric base site rocks the pink and the green rocks here and they're overlaid. Excuse me by whole series of rocks belonging to what's called the Dalradian which is a whole group of rocks, maybe 20 or so kilometers thick in total deposited over 200 million year time frame on the edge of this Rudinia continent that was splitting up. So Rudinia was the supercontinent that existed at 1000 million years ago. Remember Columbia was a supercontinent existed two billion years ago. We've got this new supercontinent Rudinia, which is breaking up and a whole load of rocks are formed on the edge of it, which is called the Dalradian and the Dalradian rocks do cover the pretty much Scotland from Euler up to Peterhead. And they sit on top of this rinse complex, which as I've just said only occurs on I only exists on either as exposure but it's underneath everything and all these sort of rocks exist along strike along in Scotland. So we're going to have a quick look at this one here and then we'll move up to look at these and these at the top. I'm going to take you to Kilkiran Bay, we were down at Lossick Bay earlier and Brooklady was over here and put Charlotte was here and that spring was here, and we're just on the coast on the far west of Euler at Kilkiran Bay. And here's a sort of badly made panorama of Kilkiran Bay and we've got here. These, what we're called meta sediments these are meta sandstone sandstones that were once sand, then it became sandstone and they'll be metamorphosed to to become quartz sites and meta sandstones and then we've got mudstones in here which are slates and then we've got more sandstones over here. And there, this is the pink rock here it's a bit dirty and when you look at it, you can't see that but when you get there it's pink. This is the pink rocks this is two billion years old 1.8 billion years old pink nice. And over here is 800 million year old quartz sites so there's a billion years of geology missing or time missing in this billion year gap and this is Alastair from Stockholm standing straddling the billionaire gap. You can walk on a low tide you can walk into this and sort of put your hands either side of the gap, where there's a billion years of Earth's history sort of missing between the. This is quite called the Kilkiran shear zone. Your picture was a bit of it here you can see that all on the on the earth satellite photograph here. These rocks here are the nicest and these rocks here with a lot more structure and foliate lineation here are the meta sandstones of the Columnsie group. And that picture was taken in here. The sheer zones offset by this fall here but there's a Kilkiran shear zone is a very prominent feature separating the two billion or the 1.8 billion year old rocks of the nice here from the meta sediments on this side. And that that line is quite prominent it's a lovely walk down the coast here and all these little tidal inlets and tidal bays. And it's a lovely place to go because it's a sheer zone. It erodes out from the harder rocks of the court sites here and the pink nice is here there's a sort of the zone of erosion along the coast here, and it's a lovely place to go. Further north, the, these rocks turn into above slightly above these rocks of the Kilkiran Bay we get these are called turbidites these are Columnsie group turbidites where they're deposited in very deep water. And they're up cycles of sand to mud and sand to mud deposited probably what during earthquake times. So there's a whole lovely succession of rocks from Kilkiran to saligo which formed the Columnsie group, which go to Columnsie as well. And they're all around about 800 million years ago and they're the first deposits formed as Rodinia broke up. So that's the map I showed you earlier. In this sort of growing split, you know the split is starting a bit like the Red Sea today. The Red Sea is splitting Arabia from Africa, and breaking up the African Asian continent. This split started to break up the Rodinia super continent and this this happened and got bigger and bigger as the Dalradian sequence was deposited. It's in a small rift and it got a little wider rift and eventually became an ocean basin that separated Laurentia, which is sort of basically North America, Scotland, Greenland, from Baltica. So we finished over here. Just checking how we're doing for time. Yeah, okay, yep. We've been here. We've been here. We've been here. We've looked Columnsie group, which is the green stuff we've looked at the Rins complex, which is that I'm not going to take you over to the sort of sort of central part of either to a place called Barry Grant here and we're going to look at some the deposits of rocks in this area and up in here. And at the end of the talk we're going to end up down in here but we'll start at Barry Grant, which is right in the middle of the map here. And the rocks we're going to look at our rocks in the middle of the succession, around about 700 million years old. So these three types of rock here, the Lossett limestone, the Port Asgig Tillite and the Bonnehaven Dolomite. These limestones are like a sandwich of rocks that are limestone carbonate type rocks. Dolomite is a magnesium calcium carbonate, whereas limestone is a calcium carbonate. And it's got this thing called the Port Asgig Tillite in the middle, which is a glacial deposit. So we've got warm water limestones, sandwiching a cold glacial deposit, and this is the alleged Snowball Earth signature on Isle. So I'll have a quick look at this. Barry Grant's a lovely little place. It means Barry Grainer, which is Grainer, I can't get the garlic right, but it means it was the city town of the grain originally. Barry Grant is in the middle of Isle and it was, it was well known for its fields of wheat and barley and oats in the past. And you can see that when you look at the Google Earth maps, you can actually see that this is the fertile strip of Isle. All these green blobs here are fields that are fertile because there's limestone in it, and that's the key to sort of the fertility of Isle. And it's why it became an important part in, you've got a fin lagoon to the Lord of the Isle sort of historical center here. Isle was important because it was the production of grain. It did have fertile land, relatively well sheltered, and Barry Grant was at the sort of core of this area. And so it was a lot of these fields grew grain. In latter years it was turned to dairy. The area is gone now, it's sheep and cattle. And in the last few years, it's returned to grain, not because we want oats and barley or oats for porridge, we want barley for whiskey. And these fields, you can see these plowed fields now have turned from sheep fields to barley fields. And there's a lot of barley now grown in the central strip of Isle for whiskey. But what Barry Grant was famous for in the sort of, from the sort of 14th century on was lead mining. We'll reach just underneath on the island. This is the perhaps the during the background. There's some big lead mines that we're operating in the 17th 18th centuries. They were looking for galena, lead sulphide is this cubic sort of metallic sort of ore. There's quite a lot of it there. It was all hand dug mainly. There was a smelter at Podaskig in the 17th, in the 18th century here. And these are sort of old engravings of that. So it was smelted on the island and exported at the lead was exported. And there was a byproduct of the lead mining with silver and the Valley Grant at the quarry there. Now there's the Gartness mine that was famous for the sort of byproduct. It was actually more mined for the silver in it than the gold. Which is a goblet that's actually in the Kelvin Grove collection and it says on its little label Eila silver. And it's made about 1780 so there's silver on Eila, or there has been. The mulled rinds that were Mauritius still evoked. You can go and have a pot around these things. You're into into our industrial archaeology. There's a washing pool pond. There's big drainage addicts. There's shafts and ladder shafts. And a lot of miners were imported or immigrated immigrants came from Wales and from Cornwall to work the mines. And there still are Edward's and Griffith's on the island. The descendants of these original some of these Welsh miners that came help exploit the lead came and went it was a movement bust economy and there were sort of all sorts of boom times and poor and bad times and I've managed to pull together from all the records and the sort of amount of lead that was produced in a sort of each 25 year period from historical record now there's not much before the sort of 16th century but there were certainly you can see there were periods in history records when mining investments were made and then it all tailed off and more investments were made and it tailed off and fact there was very little very little no more lead was mined after about 1880 on either. The geologic connection is that what because there was lots of talk in the in the historical record about whether the Vikings a back before this and even in this part of the before historical records whether they've been any lead mining prior to the 16th century and an enterprising PhD student in Edinburgh did some work on the on the sediments in the various locks that these minds drained into to try and see whether there was any sign of lead pollution and integrate the lead lead record in the peak cause to the pollen records and to other dating things so we can actually try and date any geochemical anomalies in the record and this is what you found in the various locks and try to match the geochemical anomalies with the mining with the mining records and there's a crude collect connection here but the lock loss it seems to have evidence of mining that's before any historical record round about the beginning of the 15th century. So there's there's sort of a nice tie in between history archaeology archaeological history of industrial archaeology history and sort of modern geological techniques to try and try and tie the whole story together. They didn't find anything else it was any earlier than this so we were still not convinced that the Vikings mind lead on either. We know the Vikings on either virtually every settlement township has got a Viking name but we don't think they were into the lead. Nowadays Valley Grant has a huge quarry the limestone is well used on Isla for Roadstone and every track on Isla has a Valley Grant limestone and it's quite a big operation from Dunlosset estate to quarry this limestone out in Valley Grant and the mine one of the mines the silver mine actually cuts right through here so I've had a scrap around in here trying to find some silver but I haven't found any yet. Anyway above the Valley Grant limestone there's a Losset limestone and it's got these things called stromatolites which are sort of domual mounds of algal material so this is life in probably a fairly warm sea happening in and around 700 million years ago and again the green fields are where the limestone is and then the sort of the heathery hills in the distance are the quartzites and where they're much poorer soils so the farming is all done on the limestone outcrop and it looks like this when you suddenly see it exposed it's sort of a grey limestone and it has these stromatolite domes in them and it's just about 700 million years ago and it's overlained by the Port Askeg Tillite now I could spend hours talking about the Port Askeg Tillite in fact it was on to my one of my co-researchers here this morning's been hours talking about the Port Askeg Tillite is a big story to be had but I'm going to just skip over it very quickly Port Askeg Tillite is a glacial deposit formed by the melting of ice and it's a dump of all the stuff from clay to boulders that were deposited when the ice melted and we believe there's about nearly a kilometre of this thickness of rock on island which is quite unusual and it was all deposited by melting ice so each there were glacial cycles that would bring this mud and stuff down and the ice would melt and then it would get reworked by the sea and then it would then another glacial pulse would come and we see lots and lots of glacial pulses in the Port Askeg Tillite and it's it was one of the first deposits ever recognised in the world that it was a rock a fossil rock an old rock that must have represented a glaciation that happened a long time ago these guys didn't know how long ago it was dating modern dating hasn't hadn't happened then but we now know this to be around about seven just about 700 million years old and we believe that rocks of this age around the world are typified by glacial deposits so we've got glacial deposits of 700 million years old just about on every continent and the all the other evidence points to the fact that these were at sea level and at low latitude so we're talking about something very strange going on this was low latitude sea level glaciation now we have low latitude glaciation today or certainly ice fields on Mount Kenya Kilimanjaro on the equator but they're at 5000 meters this is at sea level so if we had ice today at sea level on the equator we would be pretty worried about the climate and how the climate had changed so this was what was happening these were ice fields extending to sea level on the equator or near the equator and it's obviously been termed snowball earth probably many of you have heard of this term when we believe it's believed that the earth completely froze over 700 million years ago and the deposits of asking collect one of one of the first deposits in the world to be recognized to be part of this phenomenon now how the earth got into it and how the earth got out of it is a subject for another lecture but nevertheless Islay is a key point in the story of snowball earth I've just seen another map of different map different a different author of Rodinia at about that time and I think I'm going to click again Scotland will appear yes there we are there's Scotland on it's still on the edge of this rift it hasn't turned into an ocean yet we're still in this rift there's Laurentia or that's North America there's Baltica there's Amazonia and it's Peru bit still over here and we've got this ice field all these all these blue sorry green dots are all ice deposits around the world on every continent that's got them yeah and we believe at that time all the worlds all the continents of the world were clustered on it in a single super confident Rodinia which is pretty much straddling the equator which meant it does change the ocean circulation patterns quite a lot and it may be this is part of the reason why snowball earth happens because it was an accumulation of a super continent straddling the equator I mean it's quite possible that was ice over here but no ice at the poles we don't really know but that's one of the and I've mentioned I've shown this thing called the flip which is the Franklin large igneous province and it's possible that the combination of this continent over the equator at that time along with a massive outpouring of volcanic rocks was actually enough the weathering of these rocks was enough to draw down the co2 to cause massive cooling and eventually the amount of volcanic activity that then would then increase the co2 and cause global warming again so it may be a combination of this continental configuration and this igneous province being weathered silica weathering and then volcanic gases later on bring us out of snowball earth so a lot of research is going on at the moment to this the papers every day get published on it I've just skated over it very quickly but it's a nice story and there's a lot of a lot of interest in this I just want to take you up to the north of Ida very quickly because I mentioned the potaski tillite and the loss at limestone the valley grant which is down in here these are the limestones underlie the sandwich of the tillite and I mentioned there was one on top and this is called the Bonaharvon dolomite which is sometimes called the cap carbonate a lot of these tillites and glacial deposits in the pre camping around the world of a starter limestone and there's a then there's a tillite geolodiumic type glacial deposits and then it's followed by dolomitic rocks or carbonate rocks afterwards it's a lovely place to go, this is the north coast of Ida, this is Bainan de Gares, beautiful bay, beautiful raised beaches, beautiful cliff scenery in fact these cliffs these cliffs these caves here were inhabited and lived in not just as not just as shillings I mean we're all lived in all year round by various farmers these little fertile raised beaches were farmed a lot of goats live in here now but you could live in there still they're big caves they're raised up they're now they were formed by the sea eight, nine, ten thousand years ago but now the land has risen the sea has dropped and they're now raised caves but what we come to see on the north coast is the dolomite and it's these huge mounds of algal material I remember I showed you one earlier underneath the tillite underneath the but these are huge there's one of the researchers Ian Fairchild standing there you see how big these things are these are a couple of meters high and four or five meters across and these are huge great big mounds of algal material growing in the shallow warm seas above after the glaciation had finished and they grew because nothing else at them there were no grazing gastropods there were no grazing things so the algal domes were life as we knew it at that time sometimes they're quite they're relatively small little isolated bumps and this one here this bed here extends all the way around this rock outcrop here and it's draped by this layer of sand which is that we think is a storm layer which killed off these domes yeah these domes were growing quite nicely for a probably long time it grew quite a long amount of growth here something was a storm a massive storm that deposited a foot or two of sediment over the top and drown the whole of them these storm satellites have been in existence on the earth probably almost three billion years ago so these are only quite these are only 650 million years old but you can get them today in shark Bay Australia they exist in the hypersaline lagoons that where the gastropods don't like them don't like to eat them but these are similar so nothing has changed really the present is the key to the past here the shark based on satellites are very similar to the ones we see in Isla 700 million years ago just to mention other whiskey connection here the Bunaharvon dolomite has a spring on it and Bunaharvon distillery take water from this spring and use it to make whiskey and you can see from my chemical analysis here we've had a look at this water here it's quite high in magnesium and it's quite a high pH and it's one of the few distilleries on Isla that doesn't have soft water it has hard water arguably makes a slightly different whiskey there is a lot of thought as to how much this hardness changes the fermentation process so it's not about distillation and chemicals coming through the distillation because your carbonates are insoluble they're not going to come through the distil but they might affect and they will affect the fermentation in fact soft water is liked for whiskey fermentation because it makes a faster fermentation this is slower and can reduce some higher alcohols and so higher and a load of esters as well so you know water is important to the whiskey industry and getting it right is what you do but Isla Bunaharvon is slightly different to the rest of them because of its hardness of water because it comes off this dolomite where the stromatolites are I'm going to take you down to the south of Isla still doing alright for time there's three distilleries down here as well this is Lafrogue, this is Lagavulin, this is Ardbeg and the geology of the south coast of Isla is dominated by these green stripes here and these are meta igneous rocks they were intruded as horizontal sheets of rock in the developing part of what became the Yappitus ocean, this rift that Rodinia created in Rodinia turned into an ocean eventually called the Yappitus and we'll talk a little bit more about it in a minute and these ridges of rock are prominent in the southern Isla and a lot of the original distilleries were hidden in the ridges and I'll show you some pictures of these ridges in the second This is the igneous rocks here on the left hand side and there's a ridge of igneous rocks over here with a low ground between where these soft meta sediments are, this is sort of meta mudstones and slates things in here which erode out more than these hard igneous rocks forming the intrusions The distilleries in the past, the legal ones were all located in here, this was probably a lot more wooded and you could hide a distillery away from the taxman in these little places here and that's why there's still a lot of distilleries there, there were the three or four that became legal whereas all the rest obviously disappeared It's also thought that some of these early distilleries sort of using peat for firing the malt and heating the malt which we do now, which gives the Isla its whiskey, its prominent pronounced peat taste A lot of these early distilleries, these illegal ones, used charcoal because it didn't produce as much smoke and you could hide away your charcoal distillery in the woods and make whiskey until the cows came home These are the sills, these are the igneous rocks here, this is meta igneous rock here and it's been quite altered at the bottom here, these are the meta sediments here that it's intruded into and there's been a lot of work that some of my other researchers on Isla are doing is to understand the chemistry of these and how much calm dioxide is created in the mountain building process that contributes to the carbon cycle Another sort of another study that's all about earth climate and earth history and how geology and climate are intimately related and yes it's a sort of an interesting study area Just a final sort of bit on this area, this is a long strike from Port Ellen, a place called the Aros Bay, this is Kildalton Cross, which is made out of a beautiful 8th century cross really well preserved And it's made out of this same rock in these sills, these in the literature you'll call it, it's called epidiarite, it's a term that's not used anymore, it's a meta basite or a meta dollarite, it's a basaltic rock that's been metamorphosed, it's quite green and fine grained here and makes it's often used, all of these Celtic crosses and things across the whole of our guile are made from this igneous rock, the so called epidiarite or the meta basite, and this is a particularly fine example I mentioned that these ridges and these bay and these glens between them are quite prominent, there's a bay that is formed here in the soft rocks here called Glasueg, this is Glasueg And this was one of the few places that German U-boats in World War I used to anchor, get fresh water and rustle sheep The local farmers used to sort of spot Germans, German sailors stealing their sheep and disappearing off in the U-boats So yes, this is known locally as U-boat Bay These igneous rocks were formed like this, they were formed by molten magma rising up, as a new ocean is created, a new basin is created basalt rises up In dikes, these are vertical dikes like this one that is on the south coast near Lagavulin It rises up and it reaches a sort of hydrostatic pressure level where it can't rise anymore, this is the sea here that spreads out into these sills Then more sediment is piled on top, another phase of dike intrusion happens, not a pulse, and it rises up, can't get any further and spreads out And that's why we get this pattern that you saw in the original geological map of sills, because they've all been tipped up They now actually all rotated about 30-40 degrees in this sort of orientation, so that's how they all stick up now, because they're folding that's happened But yeah, these were intrusions during sedimentation, it's quite a nice story And the sea water has reacted with some of these sills and there's some very good sort of interesting chemistry going on in the sills at the time of intrusion By 550 million years ago, the Dalradian was been deposited on the edge of the continent and Rodinia was no more I'm not going to start singing a proclaim a song, but nevertheless, Rodinia no more is broken up into pieces, it doesn't exist anymore The continents are going to split apart and eventually they're going to perform Gondwana land and Pangaea and form the next cycle of supercontinents But at 500 million years ago, the beginning of the Cambrian, these continents are moving apart and creating lots of continental shelf And this creation of these massive amounts of continental shelf from a continent that was splitting up is part of the reason why we get the explosion of life in the Cambrian Because we've got a lot of continental shelf, some of it are quite low latitudes and warm waters, shallow waters, plenty of places for life to evolve into And the Apertis Ocean is opening and England was forming over here, the earliest oldest rocks in England are about, in southern Ireland are about 600 million years old So at the time, most of Scotland had formed by then, but England hadn't And England was a long way away on another continent at the time, they were 3,000 miles apart And eventually, I'm not going to go into the story today, but the Apertis Ocean like the Pacific Ocean was at once an expanding ocean, it's now a closing ocean The Apertis Ocean eventually closed at 400 million years old ago and England collided into Scotland and it joined up with Scotland at a round about the same as the political boundary today So the southern uplands line, the southern part of the southern uplands is the boundary to England and Scotland as it is geologically Yes, that collision formed the Caledonian mountains, so 470 million years ago, those of you know your geological time periods, that's all division, in the all division period It was when Scotland had mountains as high as Everest, which is Everest, and this is perhaps a juror about the size of Everest, it's a nice fake picture, but nevertheless it sort of shows the scale of the mountains, they were big mountains, this collision that happened when the Apertis closed caused a large mountain belt to form, which has now been eroded away And what we see today are the stumps of these mountains here, these are the folds I showed you in the first picture, so the collision caused crumpling of the rocks, folding of the rocks You can see these rocks are sort of bent and folded, this is at Salago Bay, there's a lovely fold here in the rocks here, so this is, folding wasn't too dramatic on either, it was quite Further, as you come near the collision zone to sort of Loch Lomond area, you get a lot more deformation, a lot more tighter folding, but these folds were like the gentle rocks in the carpet here, they were quite gentle Just to sort of move on geologically from the or division right up to the tertiary, this is 50 or 60 million years ago on the north coast of Ireland, we get these things, these dykes, remember I showed you some dykes earlier, these are vertical sheets of igneous rock intruded into the sedimentary rocks, so the sedimentary rocks are, this is the bottom of the Dolomite again, and then you get these massive cracks forming an igneous rock, molten rock, forcing its way up into these cracks They're quite on the north coast of Ireland, they're, they're a beautiful sort of very stunning sort of feature of the north coast, they obviously erode less than the Dolomitic rocks, Dolomitic rocks surrounding them And this all happened at about the time of the meteorite collision at the end of the, at the end of the Cretaceous, so around about 60 or 65 million years ago, there was a huge amount of volcanism going on in Scotland, in a lot of it in fissures And a lot of these fissures are now occupied by dykes which trend this way, and the dykes I've just shown you trended this way across, across Isla, across Dura, across there, and they, all the dykes radiate out from volcanic centres that were situated in Skye, in the Merkin, Mull, and the Antrim Plateau, there's also a lot of lava as well, and these dykes, the ones you see on Isla, probably come from a submerged volcano underneath the, I've forgotten its name, the Blackstones Bank offshore And then out by the scary war lighthouse there's a submerged volcanic complex, it's probably like a submerged version of Skye if it's underwater, and there was a big volcano complex here and these dykes were coming out and this is all part of the opening of the North Atlantic. There's a map of the North Atlantic. The continental shelf goes right out past Rockall Hatten Bank, and if you go to this point, all this is oceanic crust, new oceanic crust that's formed in the last 50 million years and this is zero, this is new crust forming right down the middle of Iceland, and you can age date this is zero, 10, 15, 20, 25 to about 50 million years This is a new, quite a new ocean basin formed 50 million years ago, we were right next to Greenland, well the edge of the continental shelf was, so the continent now we keep thinking it's here, but it's actually way out here, this was the bit that was joined into Greenland 50 on 60 million years ago. How are we doing for time? Yeah, just about to finish, at the very end of geological time we're now in the current ice age, but 25,000 years ago Ayala was covered in ice, Scotland was covered in ice, the British Irish ice sheet was contiguous with the Scandinavian ice sheet. It covered quite across the North Channel, Northern Ireland, Middle Ireland was all covered in ice, and most of the debris from Scotland is actually out here. All the erosion products of this ice sheet are actually stuck out here and these big fans of rock, deep and deep on the edge of the, off the edges of the continental shelf. On Ayala there evidence by a soil you showed you the caves, these are the Ruiz beaches, there's actually a terrace above that with a second beach. So there's a complex geological deglaciation history on Ayala that's subject to many studies and that's a lot of good interest to geomorphologists on Ayala. But a lot of Ayala is, when it's not got some limestone on it, a lot of Ayala is covered in this stuff which is glacial, this is modern till. You remember I showed you the 700 million year old till, a lot of Ayala is covered in this stuff which is difficult to grow on and if you get a lot of this stuff, this till, or boulder clay as it's called, it's sort of a nightmare. But where it's, where you get glacial outwashed gravels, sand in Iceland, you get these gravels and you got a lot of gravels on Ayala and sands that were deposited by meltwater rivers flowing off the ice sheets. This is a channel, a gravel channel, these are sands, holes that are San Martin nests and it's lovely place to go and watch San Martins where they love the sand. They don't like the gravel so much, but they love the sand. The beauty of these is that they're very good for growing barley and Kilhoman distillery have owned the land around the distillery now and there's a lot of barley grown because this is good well drained gravels. The tills and things are up on here, there's rubbish up here on the hills with bare rock and till but down in here where you get these glacial outwashed gravels and a bit of windblown sand and stuff mixed in with well drained soils and grow good barley for whiskey around about Kilhoman. Another interesting thing at some of these tills, this is a glacial marine till, it's actually been deposited by a snout of a glacial into the sea. It's got flints in it and these are flints that were found in here. We think these flints have come down the glacial stream from Mull and they were picked up by Mesolithic hunter gatherers after the ice. 8,000 years ago, these rocks were these deposits and the beach deposits that were formed by the erosion of these were very important to the hunter gatherers of the first after the ice inhabitants of Eila 8,000 years ago in the Mesolithic. And there's a lot of Mesolithic study being done on Eila. In fact, it has been found these are 8,000 year old ones but it has been found a sort of tundra hunting camp that's probably 11,000 years old on the east coast of Eila. So the sort of archaeology of Mesolithic into the Neolithic archaeology of Eila is really interesting and flint was a key part of it because flints rare in the western Hebrides and they would obviously, if and when they found it, it became an important resource for the Mesolithic hunter gatherers. So that's pretty much it. As I say, I have written a book on it with Roger and Alistair. It covers these excursions. We've seen most of the rocks on these excursions. I am in the process of writing volume two to cover some nice excursions on Dura, three on Collins and a few more on Eila to sort of complement it. And I might rewrite and re-issue the first edition of this. This is a 2017 updated edition with its whisky recommendation. Each walk has a whisky recommendation. And that's where we are now. Time for a dram. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, David. Fascinating talk. We've got a few questions have come in already. But perhaps if we could maybe wait for five minutes to give people a chance to put in any other questions they might have, give you a chance to have a dram and wet your throat again. And so I'll start again in 8.30. And if anyone has any questions, please use the Q&A tab. Type your question into there. And if there are other questions that you see already there that you're interested in, please upvote them so that we can see what people are interested in. I'll meet myself again for moments and back with you in four minutes. Thank you. And so I'll read them out and if you then want to give us your answers for those please. Okay, I've got them on my screen. You probably don't need to read. You can read them if you like, but yeah. But read them out. But I have them on my screen. That's great. If you'd actually done there's a couple that was coming through the chats rather than through the Q&A. But if you're happy to read them, then that's fine. Okay, I'm just. I'm just trying to think where I start. Okay, I'm just at the top of my list here I've got. Isla distiller is a spread across a very different rock types produce a whiskey with a relatively similar taste as it suggests that water chemistry is very little effect for the use of peat drying the grain. That is an interesting question I mean peat drying the grain is the main reason for the, the peatiness of Isla whiskey obviously some whiskies aren't peaty on Isla. I mean, isla whiskey is not peated neither is Buona Harvan. So yes, the whiskey that the peating and the barrels have a huge effect more so than the water chemistry but I think the water chemistry is interesting and yes, it's. I mean our beg for example has quite a high humus content because the water sits in a muddy PT lock for a long time before it gets into distillery and there's a high humic content we think probably gives a sweet whiskey. So there is more changes at the margin I would say with the with the with the geology in the whiskey and the the. Yeah, most of the Isla water is what in the distiller is is from the is basically rainwater with a bit of peat in it but the peat in the in the water does not give the what the peat taste it's the burning of the peat to fire and dry the peat that causes the phenols to come into the into the whiskey which phenols being volatile chemicals do transfer through the still process. Someone said the geology I ended up with the reason why there's so many distilleries well there is a geological reason as I mentioned about the illegal stills on the island, and they maintain themselves there. You know, since then there's just been more more distilleries, because there's an infrastructure for it as well and there's a new distillery, whether the whether COVID-19 will change that there's a new one plan for poor Ellen. And for Ellen is going to open again. So there's and there's a brand new one as well so there's there's a piggybacking effect going on with more and more. The question from Pat Monaghan, could you say about the fossil record well basically the the stromatolites are the main indication of life. And someone's mentioning here just by either about Martin Brazier. Unfortunately, died recently. Worm cast it's not the blobs along its length. He, he later rescinded that interpretation and believed it was, it was more of a diagenetic or a chemical effect post burial rather than a worm cast that we did at the time I to paper on it saying it was one of the oldest fossils. In the same formation. This is the Bonnehaven Dolomite where I mentioned where the stromatolites are is where Martin found this, this cast led to cast and in fair child at Birmingham has done a lot of work on either in the carbonates and reckons that there are indications of micro fossils of small sort of planktonic type things that have been preserved in preserved originally in Glauconite but now in Micah in the after metamorphism in the same rocks that Martin found his worm cast. So, yeah, there's, there's this possibility of the things that there's also some things called Acrotarchs as well. Which are not really diagnostic but there certainly was life in these seas it was primitive life life, not as we know it, dominated by algal stuff but there would have been soft body things we know. And then after the Ice Age we get into the Edykarian where we do get around the world more sort of fossils, but say on Islay we've got this minor indications of life, and the major indication being the stromatolites yeah. So, once Tricia has said about limestone as a thin layer so it is quite thin in places. Certainly a lot of good good in places that it's a combination of the fact that this, where the limestone has got some, some till on it, you get a sort of a more lime lime in the in the glacial deposits so that the glacial deposits have a lot of have some fertility in it. It grows good grass so it's quite good for the the cattle and the sheep and they're the ones that do a lot of grazing on the limestone. It's very poor grazing into the into the court sites which were very thin, very poor acid soil. So the limestone is good for grazing. Yeah. So I mean I was it has grown, as you say, over the years hundreds of years it has grown grains. And it's been a relatively fertile I wouldn't say it's very fertile it certainly compared with other parts of the Western Hebrides, it certainly has fertility. So the solicitors asked about the political boundaries I've loved this, I love this story. It's been around the Aputus suture as it's called the joining up of the collision of the closure of the Aputus ocean does form the boundary I mean the southern islands are the trench deposits that were in the oceanic trench that fought that was in the subduction zone that existed between England and Scotland and England came up and collided with it and and pushed up and and folded all the the the the rocks of the of the trench, which is to southern uplands and you know the Lake District and things were volcanic arcs way away across the ocean at one stage and they joined up so Scandinavia I think there are the Aputus suture is not just is not just an English Scottish thing it occurs right across the into the into the Caledonia aides as they called in northern Scandinavia and right across into the Appalachians as well so it's a big sort of orogenic belt that occurred at that time as this as this big ocean called the Aputus closed in closing like complicated way. Fantastic examples of the Aputus suture in Nova Scotia Newfoundland, if you ever over that part of the world. Still an ice age I think we are. Most of the time in the earth's history, it has not had ice ice is unusual. Yeah, you have some ice ages in the precambrian that we've just looked at. There's an ice age in the southern hemisphere ice age in the carboniferous and there's an ice age in the called the late paleo the mid paleozoic ice house in the old division, or that's about it. So yes. So yes we are we have ice at the poles. So we're in an ice age technically and it could just because we don't have ice here today at low levels doesn't mean it won't come back again. So yeah I think geologically we're still in the ice age. Someone's asked about interesting fossils I think I've covered the fossil the fossil discussion about the strata strata lights. The choice of proximity to the geology or the whiskey much good one anywhere and I was proximal to a distillery. I can see three from my house is just coincidence. It was just a nice saw the site on internet went over on my bike and I got my wife and said I like this place it's by this field and we did. And it just happens to be just up the hill from her clarity and next door to the head distiller he lives next door. Where are we with respect to the formation of a new super con that's a group on I mean, the Pacific Ocean will close, but the Atlantic Ocean will open and then it will close. So I think some reconstructions we've done and the sort of cyclicity if you keep moving these things around eventually they come together and they split apart it's just a sort of almost a super cycle really and a couple hundred million years if you were still around. And yeah, might have got to have been people have done some work on reconstructions of what would happen if you carry on with plate tectonics into the future where where is it all going to end up. Yes. Someone's asked a nice rocks in the volcanic are very rarely seen in Scotland that's true. We have the only pretty much. I say we've got the patch on Isla there's a tiny patch on Collins II there's a little patch off Northern Ireland. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole group of rocks in Norway called the trans Scandinavian English belt, and also the fecose fecose fecofenion belt. So there are lots of rocks of this age in in the in the Baltic area, and also obviously in Southern Greenland where they're beautifully exposed and it's all part the same arc so I think. Yeah, so the whole of the the arc system that existed on the on the Southern Southern probably the Southern flank it's probably difficult to relate modern to paleo latitudes and things and directions but yes. So in the bank of this Nuna Columbia Supercontinent, there was a large volcanic arc, like we get around the Pacific today you get the volcanic arc all the way from Kamchat around right through the Southern Pacific it's all part of the same arc complex, which is sort of on the edge of the Pacific edge of the Asian plate so. Yeah, it's a sort of, there's lots of similarities. There's crosses on either yeah there's actually quite a few, but but kill Dalton is the is the is the key one if you're interested in Celtic crosses it's a good one. There's that there's other ones up at kill nave on the north side and there are. If you want to get into this there's a lot of publications on the archaeology and early history of either David. The National Museum Services is your expert on this he's written some really good books on on the on that part of the on the sort of medieval to recent history of islanders because a gazetteer and I think called lord of land of the lordship. And yeah, if you're really interested in in island archaeology and early history the stuff there and if you're interested in the Mesolithic Stephen nice and has written some fantastic books, and is and if you look at either heritage. You've got a lot of information there on either heritage is website about and then fin lag and as well that David's very, very much involved in dinosaurs everyone asked dinosaur questions no, but, but. Some of the slides I took out of the lecture realizing it was going on for ages. I did take them out just before I left for I started. We've got amonites offshore Port Charlotte, as you that have been picked up by dread scallop dredges. So we believe there are dinosaur age rocks I Jurassic rocks. In the around Eila a lot of the sea around Eila is actually forming is formed on an ocean on on subsiding basins of younger rocks. So the reason why the islands are there is that because it's the harder rock sticking up. And the softer rocks from the Jurassic and the Triassic are in the basins and you go you can go on soft Triassic Jurassic rocks from Eila. Right across to northern Ireland. And there are amonites, often because they're a common fossil, I guess if you dredged enough you might find a dinosaur bone but, but, and they probably would have walked around on either. And we would reckon that with the island would have been a desert and then a shallow sea may have covered it round lock in dow certainly was a sort of swampy pond 250 million years ago. Just that we the rocks are not exposed, whereas they are certainly further north onto onto sky. Yeah, so we do get, you do get some fossils there. The erosion 700 million years do down the CO2. Yeah, that's into the silicate weathering. There's a lot of silicate weathering of turning of clay and then the formation of carbonates and the sea from the carbon from the car calcium and the sodium that have come down off the mountain so that the whole process of weathering the weathering cycle if it's very intense will draw down CO2 and sequester into limestones eventually ends up in the limestones in the sea. So if you get that sort of process, a lot of weathering going on a lot of clay, clays being formed from fell spars, you will end up with a lot less CO2 in the atmosphere because it's absorbed into and sequestered into limestone. I've done the dinosaur one what's going on with the small sets of rocks in the coastal part of kill Dalton area. These are the diet these are the cells remember I was saying about the cells that form the high ground. So these protruding lines of rocks come out of big distillery. They are these igneous or meta igneous rocks the cells that were formed of igneous basaltic rock that was the precursor to the formation of oceanic crust in the Aputus ocean. So these protruding lines of rocks they circle and enclose for Ellen Bay. So this is the nightmare for the Kalmack ferry captains to get in to poor Ellen because of these skerries that are these submerged lines of for the hard rock that form these that form from these sills on these in intrusions and they're they're they're all around the all around that south coast it's and our big the Freud Lagavulin in the bay Lagavulin Bay is formed from the soft rocks whereas the edges of the the for the promontries on the edge of the bay that form the mouth of the bay are the hard rocks that once held dunes and Dunnevey castle is still there as a prominent thing on the hard rock. The analogy really does affect the topography and affects the way that humans have used the topography to to build and live on. Isla silver yes but gold. No, we haven't got any gold and not that we know of. Yeah. Yeah, nice if he was but I think silver's silver and some zinc and are associated with with the lead. Salarite and some calcopyrite copper mineralization that no gold. The question really nice other not so many layers of Dalradian rocks to positive noise. Yes. Yes, I think the underneath the Dalradian equivalents in Norway there's more nice than yes you see deeper into the into the sort of core of the Caledonian mountains there are there is. So the nice in Scotland that we do a lot of night we do get a lot of nice in Scotland is Louisiana nice which is two and a half to three billion years old to the whole north of the Great Glen fault the basement rocks there are the Wissian which is older than the Rins right so the Rins is 1.8 billion and we do get some of that in in parts of Norway. But a lot of the northern part of Scotland is the nicest older again than the Rins the Rins is slightly younger originally when you look at the maps that the. Those there was wonderful old Victorian Edwardian geologists sort of discovered they all the pink rocks they all thought it was until 1988. It was always thought that the Rins was Louisian. It was always thought to be the same age as the Louisian and it was just because it's pink and nice O's it just looked the same. And why wouldn't you. It wasn't until modern radiometric dating using uranium and lead in in zirconium and zircon minerals in the 1980s, early 90s that we actually realized that the Rins was significantly younger than the Rins still old still very old but certainly younger than the Louisian you have liquid gold in abundance why would you want the metallic stuff. Thank you very much for this David that's a formal talk we've not done a virtual lecture before and this is on really well very many complimentary comments in the chat here from people who've enjoyed the talk. I've had a taste of either before from this whiskey I've never had a taste of it through the rocks before. And I found this absolutely fascinating learns a lot from it and certainly has to go and visit it now I think. So, thank you very much for doing this we would normally give us a small token of appreciation. In the hall but I'll ask George to send something out to you as a small token of our thanks.