Visit my Instagram profile
Barnacles create a streak of white on black schist on the North coast of Arran.

Barnacle Unconformity

Location Cock of Arran, Scotland

These barnacles are jostling for space so much that at first glance it looks like there is a boundary between two types of rock, which is actually what I thought was the case until I had got close enough to see better. If you do want to find two different types of rock adjoining each other, then not far from here you will find Hutton’s Unconformity, one of several places noted by geologist James Hutton where rocks of different ages are found meeting each other, with the younger rock on top. Hutton used such locations as evidence for his theory of how the Earth’s crust is continually undergoing the same natural processes today which formed it as it is in the present day. This theory of Uniformitarianism, as it was called, challenged the then-accepted idea that the Earth was only a few thousand years old. That was in the late 18th century, but it was only in the early 20th century that estimates of the age of the Earth reached the billions rather than millions of years, at least without being largely ignored.

More details
  • Location Cock of Arran, Scotland
  • Date taken 1st June, 2019
  • Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark III
  • Lens EF16-35mm f/4L IS USM at 27.0mm
  • Exposure details 20s at f/10, ISO 100
  • Keywords
    • Animal
    • Arran
    • Barnacles
    • Blue
    • Crustacean
    • Dalradian schist
    • Gastropod
    • Invertebrate
    • Island
    • Isle of Arran
    • Limpet
    • Long Exposure
    • Metamorphic rock
    • Mollusc
    • Mollusca
    • Newton Point
    • North Ayrshire
    • Rock
    • Rock pool
    • Schist
    • Scotland
    • Sea
    • Slow Shutter Speed
    • Snail
    • Stone
    • UK
    • Unconformity
    • United Kingdom
    • Water