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Tuesday 20 September 2022

Celtic Sea arena ice limits -- again

 


I have been taking another look at this interesting paper from Hughes et al:

Flow pattern evolution of the last British Ice Sheet 
by Anna L.C. Hughes, Chris D. Clark, Colm J. Jordan
Quaternary Science Reviews
Volume 89, 1 April 2014, Pages 148-168

It's interesting, but illustrates just how much disagreement there still is about ice limits on all flanks of the British and Irish Ice Sheet.  For example, the map above (Fig 4 from the article) is useful in many respects -- particularly with regard to ice movement directions of flowlines -- but it is careless in that it apparently displays ignorance of the evidence of glaciation on the coasts of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset.  It's almost as if the authors were afraid of showing ice affecting the SW coasts of England!  Also, the maximum ice edge (shown here as being located to the west of the Isles of Scilly) is now known to be very inaccurate, since the work of the BRITICE team has pushed the LGM limit right out to the shelf edge.  It is quite possible that in earlier glacial episodes the southernmost edge of the Irish Sea Ice Stream was in a similar position or maybe even further to the south, as a calving ice front.

Also, I'm mystified by Fig 4 in the same article, which has an even stranger LGM ice edge shown for the eastern part of the Celtic Sea and the outer part of the Bristol Channel.  The map shows the bulk of Pembrokeshire and Gower as being ice-free, with an ice edge some way off the western coasts of Pembrokeshire.  The map is based on an article by Clark et al, 2012, but really that is rather careless, since the LGM glaciation of western Pembrokeshire and Gower has been known about for more than half a century, with the evidence widely accepted across the specialist literature.  Somebody has not been paying attention.......


Retreat pattern map for the Late Devensian -- after Clark et al, 2012.





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