Abermawr -- the mystery deepens

Abermawr -- forget about the modern beach pebbles -- showing Early and Middle Devensian slope breccia (brown) overlain by massive LGM Irish Sea till (grey).  The ice responsible for this deposit wasted away around 26,000 years ago, as dated by OSL on a glaciofluvial sandy deposit above the till.  There is no sign of any pre-LGM glacial activity here or anywhere else on the 

southern Cardigan Bay coast.

I have been looking again at the literature on Abermawr, one of the most significant Quaternary sites in Wales in that its stratigraphy represents the full Devensian glacial cycle, beginning with the Ipswichian raised beach, running though locally derived slope breccia representing a prolonged non-glacial (periglacial?) episode to the till and ice wastage conditions associated with the arrival and melting of the Late Devensian Irish Sea Ice Stream -- and then a return to the milder climatic conditions of the Holocene.  Approximately 100,000 years of continuous sediment accumulation, with no major disruptions or anomalies. 

This was confirmed by Rijsdijk and McCarroll in 2001 (in the QRA Field Guide) and by the same two authors in 2003.

McCarroll D, Rijsdijk KF. 2003. Deformation styles as a key for interpreting glacial depositional environments. Journal of Quaternary Science 18: 473–489. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.780

The site is very well known, and was accepted as one of the "top Quaternary sites" by the Quaternary Research Association:

https://www.qra.org.uk/mp-files/uk-top-quaternary-sites-booklet-2023.pdf/

Now then,  Scourse has recently proposed that there was a substantial Early or Middle Devensian glaciation in Wales, with ice extensive enough and thick enough to isostatically depress the coasts of the Bristol Channel by c 80m.  So where is the evidence of that "early glaciation"?  There isn't any, as Scourse  has himself previously demonstrated.  

I refer to this very worthy paper by Scourse et al in 2021:

Maximum extent and readvance dynamics of the Irish Sea Ice Stream and Irish Sea Glacier since the Last Glacial Maximum
J. D. SCOURSE et al, 

Journal of Quaternary Science (2021) 1–25

DOI: 10.1002/jqs.3313

Quote:

Abermawr [51.969813, −5.0831921]

Abermawr is located on the north coast of Pembrokeshire (Fig. 1B), where Irish Sea ice has impinged on a north‐draining catchment 4–5 km west of Fishguard. The sequence at Abermawr (McCarroll and Rijsdijk, 2003) shows Irish Sea glacial sediments overlying locally derived breccia and gravels. The glacigenic sequence is deformed and comprises Irish Sea till overlain by offlapping outwash sands and gravels. The offlapping upper flows represent melt‐out, flow tills and paraglacial slope wash redistributing the glacial sediments.  The Abermawr coastal exposures in July 2013 showed Irish  Sea diamicton, incorporating thin channel fill outwash sands, which were sampled for T4ABMW01 (Fig. 2A). The OSL sample was taken from a ~0.1–0.15‐m‐thick unit composed of horizontally laminated fine to medium sand that appeared to form an ice proximal outwash channel fill (Fig. 2B).

(The OSL date from this site was 25.2 KA, in line with other dates from the N Pembs - Cardigan area which suggest that ice wastage in this area occurred around 26,000 yrs BP and that the only recorded glaciation of the site was at the time of the LGM maximum.)

So now we have Scourse suggesting that the coast in the vicinity of Abermawr was inundated by glacier ice in the Early or Middle Devensian, with an ice edge to the south of the Pembrokeshire Peninsula, having already demonstrated in 2021 that he knows the site and that there is nothing beneath the LGM Irish Sea till other than "locally derived breccia and gravels". (The gravels are not fluvial or fluvioglacial in origin, but they are very flaky, made up of small angular bedrock fragments roughly sorted.) 

In other words, Scourse has already placed on record in the peer-reviewed literature evidence that conclusively disproves his latest thesis of a powerful pre-LGM glaciation in West Wales.

Very careless indeed......