The Formation of the Physical Landscape

Terranes - the distinctive sets of rock material that are the basement for Ireland's geology.

This map identifies the distinct geological blocks that make up Ireland. The blocks orginated early in geological time and in different places. Major earth movements later brought them together. By approximetely 400 million years ago, the terranes in Ireland had reached their present arrangement.

Courtesy of the Geological Survey of Ireland 2006.
Terranes - the distinctive sets of rock material that are the basement for Ireland's geology.
Courtesy of the Geological Survey of Ireland 2006.

Terranes - the distinctive sets of rock material that are the basement for Ireland's geology.

This map identifies the distinct geological blocks that make up Ireland. The blocks orginated early in geological time and in different places. Major earth movements later brought them together. By approximetely 400 million years ago, the terranes in Ireland had reached their present arrangement.

Courtesy of the Geological Survey of Ireland 2006.
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One of the challenges we must confront to understand the physical landscape is to get our heads around the time-scale involved. The physical landscape we see today is the outcome of a combination of developments, some of which stretch back hundreds, even thousands or millions of years. Four major sets of events and processes have been particularly influential. These are:

(1) the mountain building and other changes associated, over hundreds of millions of years, with global-level plate tectonics.

(2) denudation (i.e. erosion) and weathering processes, both those operating at the present time and those which have operated, with stunning long-term effect, over tens of millions of years. These processes have helped to alter both coastal and terrestrial landscapes.

(3) the impact of a series of Ice Ages, involving several glaciations and de-glaciations, within the last million years. These Ice Ages subsequently carved out the lakes, rivers and coastal marine environments which define the Irish physical landscape.

Each of these three events and processes in combination largely determine the composition of the landscape, in terms of its rocks and soils, and its shape or appearance (sometimes called its morphology).

(4) In our relatively short existence however, humans have altered the physical landscape to a significant extent, primarily through farming and settlement patterns.


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