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Saturday, 16 April 2022

West Angle "Nature" article uploaded



I discovered that my pivotal "Nature" article on West Angle, published back in 1968, had a page missing and therefore did not make much sense!  That has now been corrected, and it can be consulted here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232783499_Age_of_Raised_Beach_Deposits_of_Southwestern_Britain

This was one of the first articles to present evidence of a last interglacial sediment suite in Wales containing pollen and other organic remains, and one of the first to argue that the interglacial deposits must be Ipswichian -- and that the red till at West Angle was above the raised beach and was therefore Devensian in age.

Much water has gone under the bridge since then, although for many years DQ Bowen and others confused the issue considerably by erroneously stating that the till lay beneath the raised beach -- simply because they had not examined the coastal exposures carefully. This confusion was repeated in the GCR volume on the Quaternary of Wales, in 1989.  See pp 76-78.  But DQB was one of the editors, so there was, to put it mildly, bias as well as confusion........

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PS.  The reason why DQB and others got it wrong is that they did not spend enough time here, and did not clean the exposure face adequately.  So they missed the substantial evidence of rafting and the incorporation of large slabs of estuarine interglacial silts and sands into the glacigenic deposits.  There were some complex glacial tectonics here, resulting in a number of "inversions" in which older deposits overlie younger ones.  It's all explained (and illustrated) here:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2017/03/west-angle-bay-classic-coastal-section.html

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