Oxford Gletscher Wiki entry

 

"Deranged" surface morainic patterns demonstrating the scale and effect of the last 

Oxford Glacier surge, originating in the eastern branch of the glacier

Submerged forest, Amroth

 

 

After the winter gales, the submerged forest in Amroth is exposed just now.  Thanks to Sian May for publishing this great photo on the Pembs Geology Facebook page........

The Noel Hill residual raised beach

 

This photo was taken on 29th January 1966, not far from the summit of Noel Hill on the Barton Peninsula, King George Island, South Shetlands.  This is not the highest beach found on that day, at 275m asl, but it illustrates the complexity of working in this sort of environment.  

I'm standing on the edge of a raised beach deposit, made up for the most part of small rounded beach cobbles.  This is where one has to record the altitude, since it is a clear junction between a blocky till bank to the left and an undulating beach surface to the right.  So is this a washing limit?  Well, yes and no. If we look at the till bank we can see that it has been cleaned up by the waves, and that the finer matrix material has been washed out and carried away, for at least a couple of metres above the ground surface where I am standing.  So the real washing limit -- and hence the maximum elevation of relative sea level (rsl) -- is higher, but we don't know exactly where it was. 

So my feet mark the position of a stillstand, where the relative positions of land and sea were stable for a number of decades or centuries.  This is both an erosional and a depositional feature --  there has been washing of the till face or edge, abd some undercutting of the till deposit, and there must be more boulders associated with the till buried beneath and within the raised beach terrace.

The reason for the stillstand is difficult to discern. There may have been an equivalence in rates of isostatic uplift and eustatic sea level rise, or an equivalence of rates of isostatic depression and sea-level fall! Tectonic factors may also have played a part, as David Sugden and I speculated in our big article in 1971:
John, B.S. and Sugden, D.E. 1971. Raised marine features and phases of glaciation in the South Shetland Islands. British Antarctic Survey Bulletin, 24: 45-111.

David and I were certain that these high "residual beaches" on the Barton Peninsula and elsewhere were covered by a short-lived glacier advance.  Some beaches will have been destroyed, while others survived.  So the ice advance was not a very powerful one.  But it was strong enough to erode and incorporate many raised beach deposits into a patchy till cover.

Cosmogenic dating of large cobbles incorporated in one of the lower Noel Hill residual beaches by Emma Watcham gave dates of around 7,000 yrs BP.  She could not match these dates against other evidence relating to the glacial chronology for King George Island, and so concluded that the residual raised beaches are not beaches at all, but remnants of destroyed kame terraces.  I disagree.  For the kame terrace interpretation, we need much more evidence.  From the hundreds of sites we examined in the South Shetland Islands, we found no evidence for substantial meltwater deposition anywhere.  The beaches range in altitude between 275m and c 150m asl -- some are to the east of the hill summit, and others to the south-west.  There are no signs of terraces that might have been formed between a hillside and a downwasting ice margin, and no signs of catastrophic ice wastage with huge volumes of meltwater refashioning the depositional landscape.  All the signs -- as far as we could see -- pointed to a very modest amount of meltwater activity and to very subtle changes in the relationships of ice and land surfaces at a time of very high -- but falling --relative sea-level.

See also:

WATCHAM, EMMA,PEARL (2010) Late Quaternary relative sea level change in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica, Durham theses, Durham University. 

Available at Durham E-Theses Online: 

http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/485/

A little piece of history

Moving house is a traumatic experience, but in the process of chucking out old files and piles of paperwork, one discovers the occasional treasure.  

I found this -- the raw material for a morse code message which Dave Sugden and I sent to our geology research director Dr Raymond Adie in January 1996.  At the time we were working in the South Shetlands, in Antarctica, and had just discovered the highest raised beach ever found in Antarcrtica -- at 900 ft or 275m above sea level.  This was near Noel Hill on the Barton Peninsula, King George Island.  

This was how the discovery was announced to the world.  Equally exciting was the discovery of a fossil forest of petrified trees, confirming previous research showing that the rocks of west Antarctica held evidence of at least one episode of warm or subtropical climatic conditions during geological history.

I suppose that discoveries such as these lay behind the decision of the Antarctic Place Names Committee to add "Sugden Ridge" and "John Glacier" to the Antarctic map.  We still have no idea who made the recommendations or citations.

===================

PS. Antarctic names are allocated in recognition of "significant and exceptional contributions to scientific understanding and/or life in the Antarctic".

Residual raised beach at c 150m asl on Barton Peninsula, King George Island.  The highest beach discovered was at 275m asl.

Another high level beach remnant on a washed surface

The Stonehenge "bluestone experts" and their multi-authored disasters

Soft rock quarrying wedges -- multi-authored fantasy, not established fact

The monolith extraction point -- multi-authored fantasy, not established fact

The revetment or loading quay at Rhosyfelin -- multi-authored fantasy, not established fact

The lost giant circle at Waun Mawn -- multi-authored fantasy, not established fact

The supposedly pentagonal socket that held Stonehenge bluestone number 62 -- multi-authored fantasy, not established fact

A stone barrier blocking off the Carn Goedog quarry exit -- multi-authored fantasy, 

not established fact

I was looking at some social media posts from around six months ago and came across one of Rob Ixer's tiresome tirades in which he attacked me for not participating in the writing of multi-authored research papers.  He implied that I am some sort of nutter, way out on a limb and unsupported by my peers -- and that my credibility would be much increased if I were to publish as part of a cross-disciplinary research team.  The further implication was that multi-dsiciplinary papers are somehow more reliable and deserving of respect than articles with single authors -- presumably because of the internal scrutiny that should exist within a group, and because of corporate responsibility for the contents of controversial or ground-breaking publications.  If only........  If only.......

Ixer and Bevins are, of course, key members of MPP's gang of around 20 researchers, who have produced scores of multi-authored "bluestone" papers over the past 15 years.  And how reliable and responsible are those papers?  Well, I think it would be fair to say that they are in general of very poor quality, packed with assumptions and speculations portrayed as facts, and showing little evidence of internal scrutiny. Some of them, as I have suggested on this blog, should never have been published, and have harmed the reputations of the journals that allowed them to appear in print or on the web.  In the cold light of day, they have also harmed the reputations of many, if not all, of the authors involved.

Let's just remind ourselves of just some of the multitude of disasters that can be laid at the door of  the MPP gang's headquarters:

1.  The so-called "Pompeii of Neolithic orthostat quarries" at Craig Rhosyfelin has been shown not to have been a quarry at all, unless it was a place where small cutting tools and rhyolite flakes were collected by hunting and gathering parties over many millennia.

2.  The "burnt hazel nuts" found in a hearth at Rhosyfelin, claimed to set a date for quarrying activities,  have no stratigraphic or other link with stone extraction acrtivities, and the radiocarbon dates flagged up as of huge importance have no more significance than the multiple other dates obtained from the site.

3.  The "monolith extraction point" at Rhosyfelin, explained for the media by MPP as being of great significance, cannot possibly have been used for the removal of a viable monolith, and the field evidence demonstrates that several small and irregular blocks of rhyolite have fallen away at different times in the history of the rock face.

4.  No Rhosyfelin monoliths have ever been found in Neolithic or Bronze Age stone settings in Pembrokeshire, and not a single Stonehenge monolith can be provenanced to this site.  There is no evidence that the Rhosyfelin foliated rhyolite was ever considered "special" by anybody other than the MPP team.

5.  The claim that there was "monolith quarrying on an industrial scale" at Carn Goedog has quietly been dropped, and it now appears that only half a dozen or so of the spotted dolerites MIGHT have come from somewhere on the Carn Goedog dolerite sill (if it is really just one sill).  Most of these are not elegant pillars but weathered and abraded dolerite boulders.

6.  There is no sign that spotted dolerite from Carn Goedog or anywhere else was valued either in Pembrokeshire or at Stonehenge.  To pretend that the stone was special in some way is highly disingenuous.

7.  The radiocarbon dates from Carn Goedog do not fix a quarrying episode at the site.  They simply demonstrate (as at Rhosyfelin) a long history of intermittent use by hunting and gathering parties over many millennia.

8.  The "engineering features" listed by the MPP team at their two "quarrying sites" are shown to be figments of a fertile imagination, and do not withstand scrutiny.

9.  At Waun Mawn, the disasters are even greater.  The "lost giant circle" announced with the aid of a massive and tightly orchestrated media and TV campaign, has quietly disappeared, and the MPP team has had to accept that (as pointed out by me and many others) there never was a stone circle.  The ludicrous fallback position is that Neolithic tribesmen INTENDED to build it but never quite got round to actually doing it.........

10.  The claim that Stonehenge bluestones were "parked up" in a lost circle at Waun Mawn before being uprooted and carted off to Stonehenge has now been quietly abandoned.

11.  The claim that monoliths from Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog were used at Waun Mawn was shown by me to have no foundation in fact, and the MPP team has now been forced to accept that I was right.

12.  In spite of the "astonishment" of Alice Roberts and others in the media about the initial placing of Stonehenge monolith No 62 in a perfectly shaped socket at Waun Mawn, MPP and his team have been forced to admit that it was all fantasy.

13.  There has been no acceptance from rock mechanics specialists or other geologists that soft rock "wedges" were used at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog to assist in the removal of pillars and slabs from the rock face.  The idea simply makes no sense whatsoever.

14.  The idea that there was a revetment or quayside at Rhosyfelin, used for the loading of monoliths onto sledges or rafts, has not been supported by anybody who is familiar with the site.

15.  The wide range of radiocarbon daates obtained from Waun Mawn (extending from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age) effectively falsifies the idea that this was a special site with intense activity before and during the construction of Stonehenge.

16.  The current theory that large stones were placed across the "quarry exits" at both Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin (to prevent future quarrying) is patently nonsensical since there are no "exits" that could not be bypassed quite simply at either site.

17.  After arguing for many years that there are very few rock types in the Stonehenge bluestone / debitage assemblage,  the MPP team has had to accept my point that the bluestone material has come from multiple provenances, predominantly in the west.  The team has had to turn its own argument on its head, and now claims that the bluestones came from many different places, in all quarters of the British Isles.

18.  The provenancing of Stonehenge bluestone fragmants (from excavations and museum collections) is deemed by the MPP team to have provided "exact matches" with at least two localities in upland Preseli.  The matching is NOT exact, and doubt still remains as to where the Stonehenge bluestones might have come from.  The assumption that the bluestones have all been "brought from" upstanding tors or crags is not supportede by hard evidence.

=============

I could continue, but I can't be bothered.  If you get this much confusion in a group of authors, such a lack of internal discussion and scrutiny, and such a total lack of consistency in both evidence presentation and interpretation, then the credibility of science itself is brought into question.  

Let's just invite all 20 authors in the MPP group to write their own papers in future, which can be submitted to appropriate journals with skilled editors and robust peer review processes.   With a bit of luck, we might then get some relief from this endless stream of dodgy science, wild speculation and media hype.

The myth of the Newgrange "white quartz facade"

 

I was intrigued to see, in the latest "distant stone sources" paper from MPP and his merry gang, that the source of the quartz used in the facade of Newgrange was claimed to be around 80 km away, to the south.  See Fig 1 in the article, and text page 114.  As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence to support this contention. Cooney (2000) and Stout (2002) are cited as references, but I am not aware of any geological research that might confirm that the quartz cobbles and blocks were taken from the Wicklow Mountains (near Glendalough).  That piece of the myth is repeated over and again in social media.

It's true that there is abundant white quartz associated with old mine workings at Glendalough,  but this does not mean that there was a Neolithic quarry there, or that this was a source for the quartz used at Newgrange!  It is disingenuous of MPP et al to pretend that this is a "known provenance" -- quartz veins (some thick, some thin) are ubiquitous across the landscape, and it is notoriously difficult to provenance any given lump of quartz unless it has some truly unique characteristics.   There is simply no reason to doubt that if (and this is a big "if") quartz blocks really were collected up and used at Newgrange for ornamental or "architectural" purposes, they were simply picked up across the landscape in the vicinity of the monument. Indeed, there are old records of abundant "water-worn" quartz cobbles and small boulders found at the site during excavation, and this ties in with the belief that much of the raw material for the old monument (as distinct fromn the reconstructed one) came from the nearby river terraces of the River Boyne. It's difficult to conclude anything from quartz stone shapes, but many of them are sub-rounded or sub-angular, and this would be consistent with sources in glacial and fluvioglacial deposits in the neighbourhood.

But a study of "facade stone shapes" would probably be very unreliable, because it is clear that many tonnes of quartz blocks and cobbles were sifted out from piles of excavation debris by O'Kelly and his "reconstruction team" between 1962 and 1975. The non-quartz material was dumped back to act as the fill as the mound was rebuilt. (This para has been corrected.  Thanks to Tim Daw for pointing out that no material was imported to the site by O'Kelly and his rather imaginative team.  He also provided a couple of additional references, listed below.)

Anyway, all things considered, this is yet another example of mythology being presented as fact............  

Parker Pearson, M., Bevins, R., Bradley, R., Ixer, R., Pearce, N. and Richards, C. ‘Stonehenge and its Altar Stone: the significance of distant stone sources’. Archaeology International, 2024, 27 (1), pp. 113–37 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/AI.27.1.13

This is interesting:

https://aliisaac.substack.com/p/controversy-at-newgrange

Yet more:

Notes on Some Non-Local Cobbles at the Entrances to the Passage-Graves at Newgrange and Knowth, County Meath.   Frank Mitchell in : The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 122 (1992), pp. 128-145 (18 pages) 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25509025

Meighan, Hartwell, Kennan and Simpson, Sourcing the rocks on Newgrange's facade: granites from the north and quartz from the south. IQUA, April 2002, NS 28, pp 4-5.
http://iqua.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Newsletter-NS-No-28_grey.pdf

These articles are both rather complacent, and neither tests the hypothesis that the quartz pebbles and cobbles are locally derived from local quartz outcrops and glacial and fluvioglavcial deposits within the Boyne Valley.  There is an inbuilt assumption that because the Neolithic structures under scrutiny were "important" or "spectacular", the stones used in their construction must have been BROUGHT from somewhere else............

On rhyolite tools

Six artefacts from Paviland Cave, Gower

This is an interesting new paper dealing with the tools found in Palaeolithic settings in the caves of SW Wales.  Now I have been highly critical of some of the work of these authors in the past,  but here -- on the evidence of a first reading -- I find that I am prepared to accept their evidence and  am broadly in support of their conclusions.  There has always been a shortage of flint in SW Wales, and so it is perfectly reasonable that in the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic the local tribes will have used rhyolite instead.  This is a rock that is fairly widely distributed and easily accessible.  It doesn't generally fracture conchoidally as flint does, but it does give very sharp edges, so it's better than other non-rhyolitic alternatives.

After all, when Dyfed, John and I looked at Rhosyfelin, this was our conclusion:  that the site had been used over 7,000 years or more as a possible source for sharp-edged cutting tools, scrapers and "flakes" that could be used for a while, rejected and then replaced.  This would explain the evidence of  intermittent occupation, the hearth and hence camping and cooking. We did not suggest that Carn Goedog was a similar tool-making site -- but that outcrop is of course made of various types of spotted dolerite.

There don't appear to be any foliated rhyolites from Rhosyfelin in the 23 artefacts studied in this article -- but it would not surprise me if some were to turn up here or there.........

I'm still utterly convinced that Rhosyfelin was never used for the quarrying of rhyolite monoliths designed for local use or for export to Stonehenge -- but it looks as if we might have some sort of a consensus here, when it comes to little artefacts!

==========================

Richard Bevins, Elizabeth A. Walker, Nick Pearce, Duncan Pirrie, Rob Ixer, Ian Saunders and Matthew Power, 2025

Lithological and geochemical characterization of ‘adinole’ artefacts from cave deposits in southwest Wales: a material of choice during the late Middle to Upper Palaeolithic, 

Quaternary Environments and Humans, (2025) 

doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.qeh.2025.100058

Provisional version: Disclaimer. 

 "This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain."


Abstract
Twenty-three artefacts previously identified as being manufactured from adinole, a fine-grained metasomatic rock, from late Middle to Upper Palaeolithic cave sites in southwest Wales have been re-examined in terms of their petrology and geochemistry. Standard petrography has been combined with automated SEM-EDS analysis for a single artefact to determine the mineralogy and textures of that artefact, while portable XRF and μXRF have been combined to establish the geochemical characteristics of all twenty-three artefacts analysed. These investigations have shown that the artefacts were manufactured from rhyolite rather than adinole, a misidentification that has been in the literature for over 100 years. Some artefacts appear to cluster on geochemical plots, such as a group of eight artefacts from Hoyle’s Mouth Cave which share petrological characteristics and appear to have come from a common source. In other cases, however, certain artefacts with similar chemistries have dissimilar petrological characteristics and are not from a common source. This highlights the need to consider both petrological and geochemical characteristics when classifying rhyolitic artefacts. The artefacts studied show that this spotted variety of rhyolite was a preferred source of raw material throughout the late Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, despite having no obvious physical or practical advantages. Identifying rhyolite rather than adinole as the raw material used in the manufacture of the studied artefacts negates the need to consider long distance transport of either raw materials or finished artefacts. It strongly suggests that people in southwest Wales, where raw materials were scarce, were using materials that were local to them. Further, there is evidence that people were effectively planning for future use or reuse of artefacts, involving curation of tools. The next phase of work will use the lithological characteristics identified here to explore potential sources for the raw material used in the manufacture of these artefacts.