Ice Ages in Scotland

In the last million years, the country has been buried by ice thirteen times, the last as recent as 12000 years ago.  With a thickness of around half a mile (900 metres), it flowed across the country, gouging out the landscape to create many of the lochs and glens we know today.

These massive ice flows followed the pre-existing Great Glen Fault caused where two of the Earth’s tectonic plates meet (just like the famous San Andreas fault in California, but not as active), resulting in the extremely deep lochs with high sides we can see around us.

The fault itself is much longer than the 100-mile straight path from Inverness to Oban, as it stretches from Norway to Ireland and out into the Atlantic.   It is thought to be 450 million years old and while quite inactive, moves sideways by 1 mile every million years.