At the opening of the Tertiary chalk sedimentation continued on the northern North Sea. Starting around 63 Ma, the East Shetland Platform was uplifted and tilted towards the south-east. Rapid erosion generated sands that were transported by large river systems to deep water submarine fans. These sands are up to 1 km thick in parts of the Viking Graben.

The Balder Formation records the most intense phase of Tertiary volcanic activity seen in the North Sea and may be the product of an outburst of volcanic activity triggered by the start of ocean floor spreading between Faeroe and Greenland.. In the lower part of the unit there are hundreds of individual volcanic ash layers, mostly only millimetres to centimetres thick but forming a total thickness of over 8 m at the northern end of the North Sea Basin, and known informally as the Balder Tuff. This ash unit is an important marker throughout the North Sea as it produces a distinctive gamma or sonic bow on well logs. The total ash thickness declines toward the south-east, but ashes are found as far away as southern England, Germany and Denmark. The ashes are of theoleiitic-basalt composition and were probably erupted from a large volcano, somewhere along the North Atlantic rift, north-west of Britain.

The cessation of volcanic activity in the early Eocene was accompanied by crustal cooling and subsidence. Sedimentation rates fell in the North Sea and muds replaced sands in the main sedimentary basins. Coastal facies represented by thin marine sandstones occur around the fringe of the East Shetland Platform. Uplift may have resumed around 3 Ma, with increased sediment supply from Scotland and Shetland indicating accelerating erosion under cooling climates.

Tertiary

The gross form of Orkney evolved under non-glacial conditions during the Tertiary. Two elements of the Tertiary environment were important here:

  • climate
  • tectonics

The Tertiary climate was much warmer but less varied than that of the Quaternary. Maximum warmth was probably achieved during the Eocene. Vegetation remains and latosols preserved between lava flows in the Tertiary Igneous Province in western Scotland and Faeroe indicate humid tropical conditions. Climates cooled during the Oligocene but remained maritime sub-tropical to warm temperate in character into the middle Miocene. Towards the end of the Miocene, temperatures dropped and temperatures in lowland Scotland remained generally close to today’s. North Atlantic cores indicate that relatively short periods of cold affected Scotland during the Pliocene.

The prevalence of warm and humid conditions is significant for the evolution of the relief. Deep chemical weathering is a highly effective process under these circumstances, leading to etching out of differences in bedrock resistance within the landscape. The deep weathering profiles would have been highly kaolinitic, as in tropical climates today and as shown by the composition of contemporaneous sediments in the northern North Sea. These weathering mantles have been stripped away, latterly by ice sheets in the Quaternary.

Orkney occupied a pivotal position in relation to the opening of the north-eastern Atlantic that commenced around 60 million years ago. Prior to this, in the late Cretaceous, the land mass was almost certainly deeply buried by Chalk and older sediments. The landmass was producing little sediment at this time and fine-grained mudstones were deposited in the northern North Sea, probably sourced from nearby Greenland.

Ocean spreading led to regional volcanic activity from western Scotland to Faeroe and Greenland. Orkney was uplifted and probably tilted towards the North Sea. Very large volumes of sand were shed south-eastwards, implying deep erosion of substantial hills or even mountains developed in Devonian and younger cover rocks.

Periods of tectonic calm characterised the middle Eocene and Miocene. Lesser periods of uplift probably occurred in the Late Oligocene and from the late Pliocene and these phases produced the hilly terrain found on Orkney today.

Geology of Orkney

  • Orkney Stratigraphy

    The Orkney Islands consist almost entirely of sedimentary rocks and subordinate lavas and tuffs of Middle and Upper Old Red Sandstone age. A Basement Complex composed of metamorphic rocks of Moinian type and Caledonian granites forms a number of small inliers near Yesnaby and Stromness in West Mainland and on the island of Graemsay.

  • Devonian environments

    During the Devonian Period, North America and Northern Europe were joined together forming Euramerica, one of the three major continental masses on the Devonian globe, with Orkney placed south of the equator. Most of Britain formed part of this landmass with mountains in the northwest and the open marine Devonian Sea covering southwest England.

  • Permian dykes

    The age of the Orkney dykes is 252+/-10 million years, placing the time of intrusion in the late Permian, a period of renewed tectonic movement in the sedimentary basins to the west of Orkney.

  • Hydrocarbon Potential

    The Petroleum System consists of four main Geologic components, source, reservoir, seal and trap plus additional processes necessary to generate and store hydrocarbons in the subsurface. Their presence is required to generate a viable EXPLORATION TARGET.

  • Tertiary of the northern North Sea

    At the opening of the Tertiary chalk sedimentation continued on the northern North Sea. Starting around 63 Ma, the East Shetland Platform was uplifted and tilted towards the south-east. ...

  • Quaternary of the northern North Sea

    The Quaternary deposits found on the East Shetland Platform are thin (Johnson et al., 1993). The Quaternary thickens above the Viking Graben to as much as 300m and provides a long and relatively detailed record of glaciation.

  • Mesozoic of the northern North Sea

    Rifting in the Northern North Sea commenced during the early Triassic, peaked during the late Jurassic, and terminated by the late Cretaceous. The Viking Graben can be seen as a failed arm of proto-Atlantic rift. Almost throughout this period, the Shetland area formed an area of positive relief.