Nessie: Hot Air Or The Real Thing?

An Italian geologist sent ripples around the shores of Loch Ness on Wednesday after suggesting the Scottish lake's fabled monster was nothing more than hot volcanic air.

Luigi Piccardi, a seismologist from Florence, said the legend of Nessie, which dates back nearly 1,500 years, could be the result of a major geological fault running beneath the lake's dark waters.

The 'Great Glen Fault', which runs the length of Britain's largest lake in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, is one of the country's few still active volcanic areas.

Piccardi's paper was on Wednesday's agenda at the Earth System Processes Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, organized by the Geological Society of London and the Geological Society of America.

Adrian Shine, leader of the Loch Ness Project at Drumnadrochit, Scotland, said Piccardi's theory could not account for all the reports of a monster.

"Monster sightings are not restricted at times of seismic activity," Shine said in a telephone interview.

However, Shine added, "I think it is very interesting that the fault line origins of Loch Ness have now been highlighted."

Piccardi has previously theorized that the visions of the Oracle of Delphi were the result of hallucinogenic vapors seeping through a fault line from hydrocarbon-bearing rock strata, and he has suggested that other mythological sites in Greece are strongly correlated with active geological faults.

"Veneration of these places may have been a result of people seeing unusual natural phenomena there," Piccardi said.

"These may have been gas and flame emissions, underground roaring, shaking and rupture of the ground. Of course the Aegean is a very seismic area, so the association might be coincidental. But I think it can also be seen in less earthquake-prone areas."

In the case of Loch Ness, he said that association appeared to be borne out in St. Columba's reports of an encounter with a monster in the loch in the seventh century. These were written down by St. Adomnan, Abbott of Iona in his "Life of St. Columba," about 100 years after Columba's death.

"In the original Latin, the dragon appears 'cum ingenti fremitu' - with strong shaking," Piccardi said. "It disappears 'tremefacta' - or shaking herself."

The Great Glen Fault is a strike-slip fault - two pieces of the earth's crust sliding past each other - like the more active San Andreas Fault in California. The Great Glen, which includes the lochs of Ness, Oich and Lochy, slashes diagonally through northwest Scotland, dividing the central Highlands from the northern Highlands.

Shine, who has studied Loch Ness for nearly three decades, said there had been significant tremors in 1816, 1888, 1890 and 1901, and some minor shocks in the 1930s.

Gas emissions have also been observed in the loch, said Shine, who observed one vent spewing methane for at least two weeks.

Shine said boat wakes, especially from large craft, are the most common cause of monster sightings. irage effects above the lake can cause ducks or other small animals to appear much larger, he said.

It is also known that surface water can flow against the wind, which can create the illusion that a log is an animal paddling into the wind, he said.

President of the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club, Gary Campbell, remained adamant that Nessie was concrete fact.

"Over the last five or six years that we've been recorded sightings, none of them have been of the bubble variety," Campbell said.

"Everybody has seen something solid so I don't know how an earthquake can be used to explain a solid hump or a solid headed Nessie."

The Loch Ness monster is a lucrative tourist draw, even if its existence has never been proven. Various monster investigators have suggested it could be a swimming dinosaur called a plesiosaur, a tree trunk, a giant eel or a hoax.

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