General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhere tectonic plates meet (quietly)
Reading the post about creationists (hilariously) citing the Loch Ness monster as a disproof of evolution reminded me of why Loch Ness is so weird. (The lake, not the monster.) Ness is one of a line of long, narrow scottish lakes that are ridiculously deep.
When you look at a map of Scotland there is a line of lochs is part of an unusually straight line separating northwest Scotland from the rest. (The lochs look like perforations, to make NW Scotland easy to tear off.) You can see the line in the rift through the land where those lochs are, and in the configuration of the ocean inlets. That weirdly straight line is where two plates in the Earth's crust meet.
The two plates are not crashing together these days. It's a pretty quiet area, geologically. They met and then pulled a little apart, leaving a very deep rift between them. The deepest parts of the rift filled up with fresh water over time and became the line of lochs.
So that's why they are such unusual lakes... long, narrow and in places deeper than they are wide. Like cracks in the Earth.
The obvious line across Scotland is one of many instances where, on a map, the idea of the Earth's crust being in sections kind of jumps out at you. The most obvious is the jig-saw puzzle fit of east South America and west Africa. But the idea of plate tectonics was so startling that all such map oddities until quite recently (1960s) were written off to coincidence.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,322 posts)rather than the boundary between 2 plates - which roughly coincides with the Scottish-English border (or at least south of the Scottish Highlands). But the Great Glen was formed as a result of the 2 plates meeting. See eg
http://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/edingeologist/z_31_04.html