An ancient photo taken in 1960 at the snout of the Kaldalon Glacier in NW Iceland. Me and my mates Keith and Dave. I'm the one on the left.
I was trying to illustrate the other day what I thought the environment might have looked like at Rhosyfelin at the time of Devensian ice wastage. Well, this image illustrates it pretty accurately. Boulders, gravels, silts, clays, till, ice and lots of water flowing rather fast........
So this would be when, around 20000 BP, just after Younger Dryas, or both. The SEA6 document seems to imply tundra for a long time after the Devensian ice withdrew and actually, when was that?
ReplyDeleteNice memories by the look of it.
No, not at the end of the Younger Dryas, Chris. I don't see any evidence from Pembs coastal sections, or elsewhere, of glacier ice in Pembs in the Younger Dryas, except in some of the highest hollows where there might have been short-lived niche glaciers. No glacier ice at Rhosyfelin.
ReplyDeleteThis photo suggests what the situation might have been around 20,000 - 18,000 yrs BP -- precise timing still a bit difficult to discern.....
Lies lies That is Skegness I recognise the advertisment.
ReplyDeleteM
Curses! Curses! Rumbled again.......
ReplyDelete"Greenland glacier sheds big ice shunk" BBC News website [Science section], 24.08.15
ReplyDeleteNot good news for Planet Earth.
But, yes, Myris, Skegness is SO bracing (especially with a NE wind.
"shunk"? what on Earth is an ice shunk?
ReplyDeleteTry "chunk" for size!
Pity you can't take MPP and some of his Associates up to a glacier snout, so as to show them what non - anthropomorphic forces are all about: hopefully they would then be at last suitably awestruck and less inclined to, as it were, "navel - gaze" on behalf of Man's myriad glorious achievements over the Millenia.
ReplyDeleteThere are other Forces at work. We arebut the custodians of the Earth, not its only architects.
Ah but sadly that is untrue.
ReplyDeleteWe have left the Holocene and are in the Anthropocene.
M
To be followed by popular myth by the Blattodeacene.
ReplyDeleteCheers
M
No No, Myris. We are still in the Holocene -- the term "Anthropocene" is very informal, and nobody can even agree as to when it is supposed to have started. Some say it started after the Neolithic, and others say it started with the Industrial Revolution. According to the accepted geological timescale, the Holocene starts around 11,700 BP and continues to the present.
ReplyDeleteI thought it had been ratified but not so.
ReplyDeleteHowever I stake my claim for the nomenclature of the Period post Anthropocene.
I hate it when they change the strat nomenclature I belief lovely terms like Nammurian and Westphalian have been exchanged for the bloody Mississippian and Pennsilvanian. NOT in my books.
M