Orkney Riddler

  The Pentland Firth  The Pentland Firth is the channel of water that separates the Orkney archipelago from Caithness,  the northern most county of Scotland. It is deep, wide, and famously dangerous to cross,  even with modern boats and navigation systems. From the ferry crossing from Caithness to South Ronaldsay interesting surface phenomena indicate what is happening beneath the hull of the boat. Flat shiny areas of water commonly suggest an upwelling mix of currents , while whirlpools imply water being drawn down into the murky deeps.   "The Pentland Firth’s eastern approach hosts intricate sediment transport pathways. Time-averaging the modelled flow field revealed the recirculatory nature of the residual flow also reflected by the inferred sediment transport field identified via timeseries bathymetric analysis.  The Pentland Firth (PF), located between mainland Scotland and Orkney, is an area of the UK continental shelf (UKCS) that experiences extreme ...

      So, This is Orkney .  A straggling group of islands off the north coast of Scotland  Hoy, and the Old Man of Hoy. The Churchill Barriers The block ships, scuttled to prevent German submarines from entering Scapa Flow during WW2. The Italian Chapel,  built by Italian prisoners of war, while theybuilt the Churchill Barriers during WW2. Stromness,  Orkney's second town. Stromness,  again Kirkwall's main business town, and one of three major ports. Kirkwall ba' outside the cathedral, a wild, confusing , and exilerating ball scrum through the streets of the town.  Abandoned WW2 structures Cliffs and beaches  Sunsets Rackwick Bay More sunsets Haar More Haar The Ring of Brodgar  The Ness of Brodgar  The Stones of Stenness  Skara Brae That's Orkney!  (In summer!) "A Bizarre Idea " What's the Story " Neolithic Migrants to Orkney " The story of the First, Founding Immigrants to Orkney  But " They must have had boats...

  Relative Sea Level     There is only a limited amount of water on the planet, and when the last ice age was dumping snow on land, it built many kilometre thicknesses of ice sheets on polar regions, and on mountainous areas.  The placing of ice sheets on land had two effects. The first was that the water that had been dumped on the land, frozen, reduced the amount of water in the global sea. The second was that the weight of the ice on the land placed tremendous pressure on the geology that it rested on. That pressure forced the land that was under the ice-sheet,  down into core of the planet. It is these two characteristics that have had a major impact on post-glacial sea levels in the northern hemisphere, but as I will explain its not that simple. Global sea-level rise   There is a limit to the extent of our ability to go back in time to measure sea levels in the Quaternary period. In many places records in the geology,  for various reasons, only go...