ROCK AND A SCARRED PLACE
Liz Bonnin’s extraordinary new series makes some amazing revelations about how our island’s stunning landscape was formed
Liz Bonnin returns to our screens tonight to take us on a dramatic journey through Ireland’s epic 1.8 billion-year history. The Island is packed with suprises, and one extraordinary revelation in the series is that Ireland was originally two entirely separate pieces of land which formed south of the equator.
Liz meets with a number of passionate geologists who are experts in showing evidence of the immense collision of continents that fused the two sections of the island together before it travelled northwards to its current position.
Together they explore the awesome power of the ice age and how it sculpted our unique landscape, and they track the ancient footprints which provide the world’s most reliable evidence for the evolution of life from water to land.
Our island’s epic geological journey began where you might least expect it — as two distinctly separate land masses near the South Pole.
In this first episode, it is revealed how two ancient continents swallowed an ocean as they slowly approached each other over millions of years.
“The collision point where they crashed would eventually become Ireland, and we show how the battle scar from his immense fusion runs like a suture in the rock all the way from the Shannon Estuary in Co Limerick to Clogherhead in Co Louth,” says Liz. This merging and folding of lands took millions of years — and even after this ancient coming together, the island’s story had only just begun.
As the rocks continued to move very slowly north, Liz explores how changing sea levels submerged Ireland in shallow tropical
waters, creating the limestone deposits that dominate our landscape and are exposed so impressively at The Burren in Co Clare.
She also examines evidence for Ireland’s long-lost deserts that formed as the island crossed the equator past present-day Egypt.
In Newfoundland, the rocks reveal the colossal forces that slowly ripped Ireland from North America over millions of years, and on the Antrim coast, Liz explores the volcanic hotspots that created the iconic Giant’s Causeway around 60 million years ago. ■ The Island, Sunday, 6.30pm, RTÉ One.