Fleeting glimpse of a confusing landscape

Many millions of years ago, it seems, long before the Celts, the Tuatha de Danann, or Archbishops of any known persuasion graced…

Many millions of years ago, it seems, long before the Celts, the Tuatha de Danann, or Archbishops of any known persuasion graced our land, this island may have been divided in a much more drastic way than at present. Between the north side and the south side there may well have been an ocean several thousand miles wide.

The notion is based on the theory of continental drift, the idea that the world's land-masses, rather than being firmly anchored in one spot for all eternity, have in fact been wandering aimlessly around the surface of the Earth for aeons.

To add to the confusion, not only has Ireland been moving north and south, and east and west in little pieces, it has also been moving up and down, changing its altitude with the periodic, ephemeral tumescences of the upper layers of the writhing planet underneath. These adventures, combined with occasional volcanic eruptions from below and the erosive effect of the elements above, have produced the landscape of Ireland that we know and love today.

If you have an interest in such things, you may care to drift along to the John Jackson Memorial Lecture at 6.30 p.m. tomorrow. This annual event is sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Dublin Society. This year the speaker will be Prof Adrian Phillips from the Department of Geology at Trinity College. The venue is the RDS in Ballsbridge, and the focus will be "The Pre-Quaternary Evolution of the Irish Landscape". But this, let me warn you, is by no means simple stuff. The lecture, according to the abstract, "presents a synthesis of the pre-Quaternary evolution of our landscape based on new evidence from analysis of apatite fission track data, onshore and offshore geology, and geophysics". Our present landscape, it goes on, is a consequence of "vertical earth movements created by the growth of the Iceland mantle plume and of a convergence in the Alpine region during the Tertiary." Reading on through the text of the lecture, a preview kindly provided by the organisers, I empathised, if I might use the term, with one of the Archbishops already mentioned en passant His Grace who allegedly found Dominus Iesus "a most confusing document". But this, I hasten to add, is no fault of the author or either of the Royal institutions. You see, I would not have much geological competence anyway, and would not be regarded, one might say, as one of the high flyers in this subject.