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Monday 22 May 2023

The West Angle till

 


I took a look at the West Angle section a couple of days ago, and while most of the section along the sea front remains rather messy and covered by vegetation, there is a good exposure of the till, with one particularly fine ORS cobble with crossing surface striations.  The striations are quite shallow, but you can feel them with a finger, and this confirms to me that this is an in situ till and not something that has been subjected to periglacial or paraglacial redistribution. Higher in the sequence, there has been a lot of redistribution, and that is why I have referred to the deposits as "stratified dark red gravelly deposits" reminiscent of the deposits so spectacularly exposed at West Dale.


I have done many posts on West Angle.  Use the search box to find the links. 

The dark blue silt and clay series is also well exposed at present, just above beach level.

One feature that is more prominent now than in past years is the rocky outcrop at the northern end of the exposure, close to the cafe.  On the foreshore there are exposures of broken Lower Limestone Shales, but in the cliff face the orange-red materials are not sediments at all (except at the top), but thoroughly rotten bedrock.  This seems to me to be the source of at least some of the "silt and clay series" which has been interpreted as interglacial, lying stratigraphically beneath the dark red till which fills an eroded gully.




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