Formation
The discovery of the Moine Thrust in 1907 was a milestone in the history of geology as it was one of the first thrust belts discovered. The formation has since been re-interpreted many times. Eventually, the Moine Thrust corroborated tectonic plate theory in that, during the Caledonian orogeny of the Silurian period, Scotland was compressed as a European plate thrust westwards over a thrust fault and above the ancient Lewisian Gneiss on the Laurentian Plate.
The thrust belt defines the boundary between the Hebridean Terrane to its northwest and the Northern Highlands Terrane to its southeast. The thrust carried metamorphic material over 200 km across Scotland entirely masking the geology of the previous terrane. However, small windows, such as the Assynt window and the Glen Achall imbricated thrust system, allow Geologists to estimate what the geology of Scotland was like before the Caledonian orogeny.
Read more about this topic: Moine Thrust Belt
Famous quotes containing the word formation:
“The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle. This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel “safe” ... must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses.”
—Bell (c. 1955)
“The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)