Is northern Scotland an island?

19 comments

1. No

2. Aye why nae

3. Don’t tell the english!

4. Its a series of lochs and canals if I remember from my childhood. The Caledonian Canal.

5. Some bits have been helped by us, so man made island yeah why not. The Northern Isles have a new member.

6. The line they all follow is a fault line. The two parts of Scotland on either side are currently moving in opposite directions

7. Post this to r/geography too

8. Sure, why not

9. No, firstly that’s not the definition of an island (it has to be surrounded by the same body of water, not just to be inaccessible without crossing water), secondly a lot of it is canals, which don’t count.

   Anyway it’s called the Great Glen.

10. No, it has to be surrounded by a sea under the relevant regulations, so the canal and river don’t count.

    Check, Operation of the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018, definition of relevance is:

    1Meaning of “island” and of “inhabited island”

    (1)In this Act, “island” means a naturally formed area of land which is—

    (a)surrounded on all sides by the sea (ignoring artificial structures such as bridges), and

    (b)above water at high tide.

    (2)In this Act, “inhabited island” means an island permanently inhabited by at least one individual.

11. Asked my geography teacher this question about twenty years ago and the answer is actually no.

12. Currently, no. But the land north of the Great Glen Fault is a fickle mistress 😉

13. I don’t know about Scotland but I heard Oman is an island

14. I mean, everything’s an island if you draw the boundaries wide enough.

15. All of Great Britain is an island.

16. It could be with some digging

17. If you can jet-ski around it it’s an island (100% official definition)

18. It used to be… sort of.

    The Iapetus Ocean opened around 800 million years ago, the forces of continental drift pulled apart an ancient continent. Roughly 500 million years ago, similar forces closed the ocean again, bringing together Scotland and England.

    The closing of the lapetus Ocean caused a series of continental collisions known as the Caledonian mountain-building event (Caledonian Orogeny). It was in the lapetus Ocean, as it closed, that the volcanic islands thought to be the foundations of the Central Belt formed. These volcanic islands are essentially where the area marked on the map in the title would have been.

    The Caledonian Orogeny occurred in three stages.

    1. The chain of volcanic islands collided with the Grampian Highlands about 480–460 million years ago. This is called the Grampian Event. This event formed hundreds of volcanos and made up the mountains on both sides of the Great Glen, soon after formation they may have been as high as the Himalayas.

    2. Baltica (A small plate including Scandinavia, a large portion of Russia, and most of the mainland of Europe) collided with the Northern Highlands about 440 million years ago, pushing together the Northern Highlands and North-west Seaboard. This is called the Scandian Event.

    3. Eastern Avalonia ‘soft docked’ about 425 million years ago, as England softly collided with Scotland (at roughly the same area as the border now stands).

    Around 425 million years ago the Caledonian Orogeny was complete, and with it, Scotland’s geological foundations and political disappointment were brought together.

19. Yep the northern part used to be called Canada. Then through tectonics it crashed into the rest of UK. Then later the Atlantic opened up and created Iceland too.