British Tertiary Volcanic Province

This work is part of a series which aims to provide a public record of the features of interest at localities being considered for notification as Sites of Special Scientfiic Interest (SSSIs). This fourth volume deals with the exposed rocks of the British Tertiary volcanic province on the west coast of Scotland.

When setting out to produce the Geological Conservation Review series the then Nature Conservancy Council rightly selected the British Tertiary Volcanic Province as one of its front-running topics. By any standards the Province is one of the outstanding features of British geology. It has contributed to the development of geological ideas, applied world-wide, over about 200 years, and holds a continuing position as a focus for international research. A prime earth science concern of any conservation agency must be to preserve the evidence on which scientific advances have been based, and to ensure that future generations have an opportunity to study the problems that remain. Of course, geological features are generally speaking pretty robust. Casual and thoughtless destruction on a grand scale, to which biological assemblages are so vulnerable, is not generally a serious problem. But geological knowledge depends on seeing the relationships between rock masses, the critical areas of outcrop may be few and far between, both in Highland Scotland with its peat moors and forests and in the agricultural lands to the south. It is documentation of these sites showing critical inter-relationships that is the business of the Geological Conservation Review series. This volume provides the NCC's successor body, Scottish Natural Heritage, with the scientific justification to safeguard the described sites, which are the highlights of the Province.

This volume presents papers from a conference on 'Early Tertiary volcanism and the opening of the NE Atlantic' held in London in March 1987. They are grouped into six categories, essentially on the basis of structural and geographic setting: Volcanic and tectonic framework; Dipping reflectors and NE Atlantic evolution; E Greenland and the Faeroe Islands; Volcanism in basins to the N and W of the British Isles; British Tertiary Igneous Province; The sedimentary record.

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 100. Continental flood basalts, volcanic passive margins, and oceanic plateaus represent the largest known volcanic episodes on our planet, yet they are not easily explained by plate tectonics. Indeed, some are likely to record periods when the outward transfer of material and energy from the Earth's interior operated in a significantly different mode than at present. In recent years, interest in large-scale mafic magmatism has surged as high-precision geochronological, detailed geochemical, and increasingly sophisticated geophysical data have become available for many provinces. However, the sheer amount of recent material, often in the form of detailed collaborative research projects, can overwhelm newcomers to the field and experts alike as the literature continues to grow dramatically. The need for an up-to-date review volume on a sizable subset of the major continental and oceanic flood basalt provinces, termed large igneous provinces, was recognized by the Commission on Large-Volume Basaltic Provinces (International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior), and the co-editors were charged with organizing and implementing such a volume. We hope that this volume will be valuable to researchers and graduate students worldwide, particularly to petrologists, geochemists, geochronologists, geodynamicists, and plate-tectonics specialists; it may also interest planetologists, oceanographers, and atmospheric scientists.

This Special Report comprehensively describes the stratigraphy and correlation of the Tertiary (Paleogene–Neogene) rocks of NW Europe and the adjacent Atlantic Ocean and is the summation of fifty years of research on Tertiary sediments by Chris King. His book is essential reading for all geologists who deal with Tertiary rocks across NW Europe, including those in the petroleum industry and geotechnical services as well as academic stratigraphers and palaeontologists. Introductory sections on chronostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and other methods of dating and correlation are followed by a regional summary of Tertiary sedimentary basins and their framework and an introduction to Tertiary igneous rocks. The third and largest segment comprises the regional stratigraphic summaries. Regions covered are the North Sea Basin, onshore areas of southern England and the eastern English Channel area, the North Atlantic margins (including non-marine basins in the Irish Sea and elsewhere) and the Paleogene igneous rocks of Scotland.