Geology of NE Wales: Introduction
The geology of north-east Wales tells a 500 million year story of
deep-sea muds crumpled and fractured by earth-movements, shallow
tropical seas teeming with life, swamps with giant mosses, vast hot and
barren deserts periodically inundated by flash floods and, in the
relatively recent past, vast ice sheets sculpting the landscape. These
changing environments have led to the formation of a variety of rock
types, which have had a major influence on the shape of our landscape.
When
the oldest rocks exposed at surface in north-east Wales were deposited,
Wales, as a part of the ancient microcontinent of East Avalonia, was
situated deep in the Southern Hemisphere. Continental drift has seen
Wales gradually work its way northwards to its present position,
sometimes incorporated into huge supercontinents that no longer exist.
It now lies close to the western margin of the Eurasian Plate of
continental crust.
It is convenient to divide the geological history of North-East Wales
into four sections, which are as follows:
Lower Palaeozoic (Ordovician and
Silurian)
Upper Palaeozoic (Devonian,
Carboniferous and Permian)
Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic and
Cretaceous)
Cenozoic (Tertiary and Quaternary)
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Above: Simplified solid geology of NE Wales
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