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Kind: captions
Language: en-GB

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I'm at Urquhart Castle, on Loch Ness, in the
Highlands of Scotland. This whole area is

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part of the Great Glen Fault -- which runs
north-east to south-west, from the North Sea,

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through Inverness, across Scotland in an almost
straight line, forming Loch Ness, then all

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the way across the Irish Sea and into Ireland.
It's a transcurrent fault, two bits of the

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earth sliding sideways against each other.

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This is the middle of the Highlands, the mountains
that stretch across Scotland and all the way

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up Norway: the same mountain range, formed
when continents collided nearly 400 million

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years ago. This was before Pangaea, the giant
supercontinent, all the land on Earth in one

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place -- that would form a hundred million
years later, and these would be the Central

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Pangaean Mountains. The timescales we're talking
about are incomprehensible to humans.

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But Pangaea eventually split up. Land continued
to move, at roughly the same rate your fingernails

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grow. And over this unimaginably long time,
this mountain range was split. Not just by

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the North Sea between here and Scandinavia,
but by the slowly-forming Atlantic Ocean.

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Look at Newfoundland, in the north-east of
Canada: you'll see the same features, and

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the same north-east to south-west line of
the Great Glen Fault. Canada and Scotland

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are separated by an ocean and still slowly
moving apart, but they were once connected.

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The fossils and geology match. These mountains, these gorgeous mist-shrouded Scottish mountains:

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they're also the Appalachians, the chain that runs through the southern United States.

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Now, there's been a lot of erosion and uplifting since --

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happens in the best part of half a billion years, but once upon a time they were one and the same.

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The Scottish Highlands and the Appalachians
are the same mountain chain,

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literally an ocean apart.

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