The Garvellach islands, off the west coast of Scotland, are mostly untouched by humans.
Thanks to its remote location, the island has been able to hold secrets that scientists have unveiled as the key to unlocking our understanding of the time when the Earth froze over some 720 millions years ago.
Hidden in the cliff edge rocks are details about what exactly happened just before the great freeze created ‘Snowball Earth’.
Clues are rare, almost impossible, to find. It was thought the reason why was because rock layers – a precious way for researchers to understand the climate going back millions of years – from the critical period eroded away.
In fact, no rocks on Earth have any trace of the planet’s conditions in the immediate period just before the great freeze.
Except, Scotland’s remote islands.
A team of scientists from University College London have revealed that Garvellah’s rocks have gone unscathed. And thanks to that preservation, the rocks in this remote Scottish island hold records of the catastrophic years when the Earth plunged into an icy, dangerous climate of harsh, freezing temperatures.
Bizarrely, Scotland was located on the equator 720 million years ago.
“We capture that moment of entering an ice age in Scotland that is missing in all other localities in the world,” said Professor Graham Shields of University College London, who led the research, speaking to BBC News.
“Millions of critical years are missing in other places because of glacial erosion – but it is all there in the layers of rock in the Garvellachs.”
His PhD student, Elias Rugen, made the research breakthrough. Elias’s results are now published in the Journal of the Geological Society of London.
The PhD student identified the Scottish rock layers as coming from the period that does not exist anywhere else on Earth.
His discovery has caught the attention of the world of science, with the prestigious golden spike a potential prize.
The golden spike is put in places where the best record of geological events are found.
Elias is pressing his case and has invited judges of the golden spike to take a look. Will he win? We won’t know until the next stage, when the geological community has the chance to object.
If all goes to plan, there may be a golden spike – in name only – on a remote Scottish island.
