Home▸Geology & Earth Science▸Edinburgh: Scotland's Capital, Built on an Extinct Volcano

🏔️ Edinburgh: Scotland's Capital, Built on an Extinct Volcano

An interactive 3D geological cross-section of Edinburgh's volcanic plug and crag-and-tail landform, showing how Arthur's Seat and the Castle Rock formed, with a toggle to overlay the historic Old/New Town street layout.

Geology & Earth Science3DAdvanced60 FPS🌍 Earth

A 3D geological cross-section of Edinburgh showing how a 350-million-year-old volcanic plug and a west-to-east Ice Age glacier together carved the crag-and-tail landform beneath the Castle and the Royal Mile.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Hard basalt resists glacial erosion far better than the sedimentary rock around it, so as an ice sheet grinds past it strips the plain bare while sheltering a wedge of rock in the plug's lee — the crag (Castle Rock) and its tail (the Royal Mile ridge).

🎮 How to Use

Drag the erosion slider to sweep the glacier across the landscape and watch the tail form. Slice open the cutaway to see the volcanic pipe cutting through layered sedimentary rock, and toggle the Old/New Town overlay to see where Edinburgh was actually built.

💡 Did You Know?

The valley gouged out north of the Castle became the Nor Loch, later drained and turned into Princes Street Gardens — the green trench that still separates the Old Town from the New Town today.

⚙ Under the hood

volcanoesgeological-formationsedinburghscottish-historycross-sectionlandformsThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install