By Dave Roberts (with selected photography by Alex Ingle)
Doggerland
The last week has seen the start of the epic trek north to south from Shetland to the Dogger Bank in the southern North Sea.
We spent the first 2 days looking at some enigmatic grounding wedge features on the sea-floor just west of the Norwegian channel where the British and Norwegian Ice sheets battled it out for supremacy during the last cycle. We also stepped boldly into the unexplored world of outburst floods and drowned coastlines with a some incredible seafloor geomorphology adding to the ice sheet story in relation to the uncoupling of the two ice sheets. Unbelievable geomorph!
From the Norwegian Channel we headed SW towards the Moray Forth running a 100mile survey and coring transect NW to SE over a spectacular series of moraines before heading into the central North Sea and the urban heartland of the North Sea oil fields around Shearwater and Erskine. Our goal was the Great Fisher Bank (that renowned last bastion of the British Ice Sheet) where we enjoyed a cracking day out sampling Holocene sand and the arrival of a racing pigeon called Terry from Thurso. Needless to say, Terry proved more interesting than the seafloor that day!
The great odyssey to the Far East was followed by 3 epic days surveying and coring east of the Firth of Forth and then down the east coast from Berwick to Sunderland chasing the imprint of the North Sea lobe. Moraines, deltas, eskers, outwash fans and tunnel valleys littered the bed of the Forth system; all soaked in metres glorious glacial sediment. Better was to follow as we moved south along the Northumbrian coast with the resplendent Whin Sill fracturing the seafloor and grounding zone wedges plastered on to the bedrock. There were also superb, quiet seafloor basins revealing the multi-coloured, muddy barcodes of the deglacial story of the Forth, Tweed and Tyne Ice Streams.
The final push now. One week to go and on to Dogger Bank for the next two days. Can we prise out the some glacial secrets from beneath that sandy veneer? Huge sand banks seem to guard its peripheral moat warning against trespass, but we are committed now and on to its shallow, upper surface. Our early cores are showing promise; we will see. Hopefully, our target sites in the Humber and Wash area will bring a pot of glacial gold at the end of a cracking month at sea. Then home.
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- Epic
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- views……
Britice-Chrono NERC Consortium 