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Monday 6 October 2014

Fracture Plane, Fair Isle, Shetland



In view of our discussions on fracture planes, joints, faults etc, I couldn't resist posting this wonderful photo from Sylvie de Weze -- taken on Fair Isle.  It shows an amazing fault plane which has been exposed by the removal of shattered debris by wave action on either side of a headland.  It's on Fair Isle, south of Shetland -- and the faults seen here (there are lots of them, all more or less parallel) are probably part of the Walls Boundary transcurrent fault system which runs for many miles and which has a displacement along it of as much as 60 km.  The displacement is so great that on Shetland it is impossible to correlate the rocks on either side of the main fault line.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Brian, Just wanted to thank you for this most instructive website, and for challenging the orthodoxy of archaeologists. I am a small boat sailor and every time I hear an archaeologist utter some rubbish about transporting stones on rafts around the Bristol Channel, or about how easy it is to navigate along coastlines I want to scream. There is not enough space to discuss in detail why this would be an unlikely way for the stones to have arrived in Wiltshire. If the method was even tried there should also be a trail of erratics along the coastline and seabed to mark the wrecksites! I imagine these would be indistinguishable from glacial erratics however, and could therefore be cited as evidence of either method of transportation.

P Thomas