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Hello, 600 million years ago, Britain was in two parts far to the south of the equator.

Scotland and the north of Ireland were part of a continent that also included what is now North America, to the southeast near the Antarctic

Circle you would have found England and Wales and southern Ireland. Over the course of

hundreds of millions of years they were pushed north and the two parts came together and gradually in the course of

this amazing journey to where we are now these islands have taken on their current

shape. It's a story in a vast scale, Oceans, open and close, continents split and collide.

It takes us from the separation of North America and Europe to the carving out of the English Channel.

We'd mean to discuss the geological formation of Britain,

a Richard Corfield visiting senior research fellow Doxford University,

Jane Francis, professor of paleocletology at Leeds University, and Sanjeev Gupta Royal Society Lever Hume Trust

research fellow at Imperial College London.

Richard Corfield, can you give us a sense of how varied the geology of Britain is and how unusual that is in such a small space?

Yes, the geology of Britain is incredibly varied, both in absolute and relative terms.

By that I mean that you can travel a relatively small distance

and cross a very great deal of geological time, not necessarily in one direction.

You can go up column, up geological column and down geological column.

And it's that variation in the geology of Britain which in fact is the reason why Britain is the spiritual

home of the science of geology.

Because of this variation, 19th century geologists were able to travel the length and breadth of the country and see a great variety of rocks and rock types, igneous rocks, metamorphic rocks, sedimentary rocks.

So why is the geology of Britain so varied compared to places like, for example, Canada and Australia, which is extremely monotonous geologically.

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