The lecture will be followed by a wine tasting.
The Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France displays a spectacular range of geological and landscape features. We follow the theme of geology, soil, and vine growing in the world’s largest vineyard. In the south, the eastern Pyrenees reveal the internal structure of two mountain belts. The younger range formed about 50 million years ago, as the Iberian continent collided with southern Europe, producing large folds and faults. These structures form the backbone of the present landscape, with high ridges crowned by mediaeval villages and castles.
North of the Pyrenees, the Languedoc Basin filled during Cretaceous and early Tertiary times with fossiliferous deposits, representing reefs, coasts, river channels and floodplains (with abundant dinosaur remains), soils and carbonate-rich lakes.
Further north, the Montagne Noire, over 1200 m high, is part of the Variscan mountain belt, formed some 300 million years ago. Highlights include deep gorges eroded through granites and gneisses; cave systems and quarries in Devonian ‘marbles’ used in the buildings of Versailles and Washington, DC, and ancient deep ocean deposits.
Northeast of the Montagne Noire, large expanses of more or less horizontal Jurassic limestones form the barren plateaux of Les Causses, grazed by sheep whose milk is the basis for Roquefort cheese. The ‘icing on the cake’ of younger rocks includes Tertiary gypsum deposits mined for plaster, volcanoes less than a million years old, and huge volumes of sediment eroded from the Pyrenees and deposited to form the plains and terraces of the Roussillon basin, roamed by early humans.
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