A room without a view……

By Elke Hanenkamp (MSCL Operator)

Enter my lair

Six o’clock in the morning on board the RRS James Cook somewhere on the edge of Malin Sea in 1500m of water, and my shift as the MSCL operator starts right now. The dayshift (midday to midnight) is still fast asleep and the nightshift (midnight to midday) scientists are eagerly (or maybe more fatalistically) awaiting my arrival. The beginning of my shift marks the start for them that cores can finally be split and described soon (meaning more work for them), therefore I have been jokingly nicknamed “the harbinger of cores”.

My role during this expedition is to collect physical properties data (density, porosity etc) from the vibro and piston cores before they are split on board. I am operating a Geotek Multi-Sensor Core Logger (MSCL) in a containerised lab (also known as “the container cave”, I am in there all the time holed up with the cores). So the obvious question is – what is happening behind the closed door of the container? After the cores come aboard, they are cut into sections and labelled, and then stored for at least 6 hours inside the container to equilibrate to ambient temperature. Only after this period, the cores will be measured on the MSCL, because some of the sensors are temperature sensitive. It is not possible to prop the door open during the measurements, fluctuations in temperature would influence the data. That’s why I am holed up in the container most of the time, every so often delivering already measured cores to the scientists for splitting or taking newly labelled cores into the container.

The Multi Sensor Core Logger is a quite versatile core measurement system, equipped with four sensors – Gamma Density, P-Wave Velocity, Non-Contact Resistivity and Magnetic Susceptibility. While the core is pushed past the stationary sensors, it is scanned, and data from all four sensors is collected at once when the core pauses at a measurement point (in this case every 2 cm). Sequential core sections are loaded on to the logger, this way a complete core can be logged in a continuous process while the data is displayed graphically in real time on the computer. Typically, with measurements being done every 2 cm, a 1 m section can be logged within 15 min, but overall measurement time for one whole core depends on the amount and length of each individual section the core is cut into earlier. The shortest core section we had so far measured only 21 cm. The amount of cores sections measured each day highly varies, but a couple of days ago, 45 sections were measured on the MSCL within my 12 hour-shift, with a total length of a little bit over 41 m (a new record).

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The MSCL gives us a non-destructive way of analysing cores before they are split and sampled. The measurements can help to characterise the physical nature of the individual cores, e.g. lithology, density, porosity, and will be used in combination with core descriptions and various geochronological data to better understand the timing of ice sheet recession. The high-resolution dataset from the MSCL should also allow us to make correlations between individual core sites in the Celtic, Irish and Malin Seas fringing the North Atlantic.

A view of the world

No rest for the wicked: T3 marine sector rumbles into life…..

By Richard Chiverrell

Sites and surveys for transect 3

Leaving the Celtic Sea and the delights of the Celtic Deep, noon on Sunday 27th July, the Royal Research Ship (RRS) James Cook homed in on Britice-Chrono Transect 3 and the delights of the Irish Sea. For me work levels already high increased, with Transect leader duties to fulfil, and the challenges of finding till – glacimarine mud contacts throughout the sector, and do not forget the shells/fossils for the critical dating targets. That said without Katrien’s (van Landeghem) constant input and support it would have been ridiculous, the work in advance of the cruise identifying targets and new locations drew on considerable effort and collaboration focused on this marine sector of T3 over the past 2-3 years. The success of the efforts for T3 obviously relied on the excellent work effort, diligence and company of the cruise team, science crew, BGS and NOC Piston coring teams and the RRS James Cook captain and crew, all whom did everything they could to help us. Not singling people out, but I thank Katrien for constant input, advice and support as co-leader on this transect and Colm as Science Lead on JC106 cruise.

In the Celtic Sea, the ship was home to the friendly academic interplay between James and Daniel, the Irish Sea also offered up a number of longer standing and perhaps more vociferous historical debates! Understanding and interpretation of the nature and extent of glacimarine conditions in the Irish Sea basin has ebbed and flowed for 4-5 decades, with some proponents holding for a full glacimarine ice margin, others subaqueous margins with more restricted access to the ocean and the other end member glacilacustrine basins separated from the sea. For all these views a comprehensive borehole and geophysical survey targeting environments across the sea floor had the potential to advance understanding, but for Britice-Chrono we clearly needed glacimarine conditions and sediments to provide the marine shells and microorganisms that we can radiocarbon date to gain a chronology for retreat of ice from the basin. Marine fossils have been recovered from coastal glacigenic sediment sequences surrounding the Irish Sea for centuries, but debate continues over whether they are in situ or derived, eroded from the sea floor, during ice advance and then redeposited in glacial sediment. If in situ they offer the potential to constrain retreat of ice margins and the development of glacimarine conditions, if derived they cannot really advance our dating control. Some challenging fieldwork and some painstaking analysis of the fossils and microfossils lies ahead.

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Our journey from the Celtic Deep ~ 51°25’N to our first survey and core sites west of Anglesey around 53°15’N took just over 12 hours at a steady ~10 knots. Our first sites, a bit of a late addition and product of general brain-storming, were ~ 13-14 miles west of Holyhead and targeted the deep waters of northern extensions of St Georges Channel. The location kind of bridges T4 and T3, and we wanted some indication of deglaciation of the deep waters between Holyhead and Dublin. On reflection I was not sure what to expect here, but we had planned a sub-bottom profiler SBP and multibeam survey line as an initial exploration, but circumstances and our temperamental SBP conspired against us. The multibeam data on the other hand were excellent, it was a decent trough 2 miles wide 30-40m deep and we used the multibeam to avoid surface sand waves. Our aims were to avoid surface sand and access the underlying laminated glacimarine units, 2.5 hours and two vibrocores later, some success >3m of mud ending in reddish (an Irish Sea glacial signature!) stiff muds. These laminated or bedded sediments hopefully were lain down under marine conditions fronting the ice sheet as the ice margin retreated to higher ground east and north between Anglesey and the Isle of Man.

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From noon 28th July we moved east and north between the Isle of Man and North Wales, and into a region a large part for me where my interest in this research started, working for and collaborating with Geoff Thomas on sections and sediment all around the Irish Sea. In the deeper waters between the Isle of Man and North Wales, our multibeam data gave us a view onto a very well preserved glacial landscape of drumlins and flutes, moulded elongate low hills shaped by the passage of ice. Uncovered as ice melted and then preserved beneath water probably ever since, their summits are grooved with markings probably formed by ice-bergs calving from and then grounding on the landform surface fronting this glacier. Guided by the multibeam sea floor topography and our shallow geophysical data we targeted hollows in the landscape with shallow fills of sediment overlying the glacial surface. Our vibrocorer can penetrate to ~5-6m depending on the sediments, absence of large cobbles or bedrock, heavy seas and luck. Fingers were regularly crossed and the only wooden items in the all metal BGS vibrocorer cabin are now getting quite worn by us touching them for luck and the right sediments. Broadly we divided the Irish Sea basin into four sub areas, 1. South of a line between the Isle of Man and Barrow-in-Furness completed by 21.30 on 30th July, the deeper waters between the Isle of Man and western Cumbria by 18.30 on 31st July, the Solway Firth (between the Isle of Man and Scotland) by 5am 1st August and finally the deep waters west of the Isle of Man by 11.30am 1st August. >500km of survey line, 34 cores in total, almost all of them reaching the reddish glacimarine muds often laminated some with dropstones and in many cores stiff diamicts with clasts typical in character of Irish Sea glacial tills seen in coastal cliff sections around the basin. We had the sediment contexts we desired, the subglacial to ‘glacimarine’ transition and water-lain ice marginal muds from settings across the transect. The nature of this water-body and answers to the Britice-Chrono geochronological questions must wait on many months of laboratory analysis, but I left the Irish Sea northwards for the Malin Sea and T7, satisfied and with the feeling that the sediments and geophysics alone will fill in a significant and long standing gap in our understanding of the last glaciation of the Irish Sea.

The raging waters of the Irish Sea

Sun setting on the Celtic Sea and B-C Transect 4

By James Scourse

A wonderful place…….

The first of the BRITICE-CHRONO marine transects (transect 4, Celtic Sea) was completed late on Saturday evening. It has been hugely successful – the result of unbelievably excellent weather and sea state, detailed planning and effective delivery by a great team. This has been a controversial and enigmatic part of the British-Irish Ice Sheet for decades with generations of Quaternary geologists attempting to reconstruct glacial events from meagre and sporadic sequences. It was the focus of my PhD back in the early 80’s. A lot of this was spent onshore on the Scillies where the evidence suggested that the Late Devensian maximum advance straddled the northern islands – a conclusion that caused me not inconsiderable grief at the time because large and influential parts of the UK Quaternary community could not accept that the last ice sheet reached this far south. Subsequent work with colleagues using new techniques has supported this original interpretation. I also analysed a series of 12 or so BGS vibrocore samples recovered in the 70’s from the central and southwestern Celtic Sea containing “glacigenic” facies. A northern suite resembling the Scilly Till I interpreted as basal till facies, whereas a southern group – containing spectacular microfossil assemblages – appeared to be glacimarine. On the basis of this available evidence I suggested a mid-shelf grounding line and marine terminus to the Irish Sea Ice Stream. I was unable to explain the origin of some apparently “basal” type diamictons very close to the shelf break; they might possibly be iceberg turbates. More recently I suggested – with additional information from palaeotidal simulations – that the huge Celtic Sea linear ridge bedforms are tidal features reworking the sediments of the terminal ice stream and the Channel River.

Then, starting in the late 2000’s, I became aware that Daniel Praeg from Italy and Steve McCarron from Ireland had become interested in these ridges and were suggesting in conference presentations (e.g. INQUA 2011) that the ridges might actually be subglacial “ giant eskerine” bedforms which, if it were true, would mean that the ice sheet reached right to the shelf break. In Daniel’s model the shelf break diamictons are just that – evidence for shelf edge glaciation. One of the original BGS cores – site 44 – recovered till from the flank of a sand ridge which might suggest that the ridges at least partly pre-dated the glacial event; Daniel, following Pantin & Evans (1984) suggested that the ridges have a carapace of glacigenic sediment and were therefore overridden by ice. But, alternatively, do the glacigenic sediments dive through and under the ridges? A major unanswered question was/is the stratigraphic relationship of the glacigenic sediments to the ridges. There was something faintly ironic in all this: I’d had a lot of grief having argued for an advanced southerly position for the ice sheet, and now here was another team arguing for an even more spectacularly extended southerly limit.

Daniel, with great persistence and motivation, has organised a series of geophysical and coring campaigns with Italian, Irish and BGS colleagues – the last in February-March this year – to attempt to resolve the two models. Spectacularly their last cruise recovered overconsolidated diamicton and normally consolidated glacimarine sediments close to the shelf edge at the southern end of Cockburn Bank (for further details). I won’t steal their thunder because their work is being prepared for publication, but it is fascinating and has injected energy into our researches in this area. Daniel and Steve and colleagues Dayton Dove and my former research student Gill Scott, are now working alongside BRITICE-CHRONO colleagues to help address these questions. Having Daniel as a participant on this James Cook cruise has been a delight and the two hypotheses have been constructively batted to and fro, day and night, with lots of jocular repartee on the nature of things emerging on the sub-bottom profiler; “that’s clearly a buried drumlin”, “no, it’s a proto tidal sand ridge” etc etc.! Were that all scientific controversies were discussed in such a friendly, stimulating and constructive way.

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So, what have we found? Searching for glacigenic sediments in this area is like looking for a needle in a haystick, so aggressive was the subsequent transgressive episode. Much of the sedimentary evidence has simply been eroded (incorporated into sand ridges??!) or buried. The BGS only found glacigenic sediments in 12 cores of the hundreds that were taken. Well, about a third of all our coring deployments recovered glacial or glacimarine sediments, from sites extending from the shelf edge to the Celtic Deep, a total of 14 vibrocores and 5 piston cores. This success is a testament to painstaking preparation – including a reconnaissance geophysical cruise – led by Katrien Van Landeghem, Sara Benetti, Lou Callard and colleagues – so that our targets were well defined. Excellent onboard sub-bottom data has also been crucial, pored over night and day by Daniel, Katrien, Colm, Richard and myself, and the expertise of the BGS and NOC coring teams. There is no doubt that these samples and their contextual geophysical data will transform our understanding of the LGM in the Celtic Sea, a topic that continues to fascinate, bemuse and, occasionally, infuriate. One of our key targets, site 44, stubbornly refused to yield anything but sand – dubbed the “sands of woe” by Lou Callard – that left Daniel, head in hands, muttering “Oh bloody, bloody, hell”!

What about the two hypotheses…well, I already have some modified interpretations emerging – new working hypotheses if you like – but I’m not going to be pushed on these until we have the data analysed from the cores. Having said that, I think Daniel might be partly right and partly wrong, and that I, too, might have been partly right and partly wrong. Such is science!

Eastern delights: following the retreat of the Irish Sea Ice Stream

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By Rich Chiverrell

The transect 4 team of BriticeChrono converged for the last time on land in a small pad just outside Gorey on the Wexford coast of southeast Ireland to complete the terrestrial sampling. The team comprised Chiverrell, Burke, Scourse (and van Landeghen) sailing Holyhead to Dublin, the OSL crew of Duller and new Britice-Chrono postdoc Rachel Smedley taking the Fishguard-Rosslare, cosmogenic nuclide team Small sailing Stranraer-Belfast, and Ó Cofaigh jetting into Dublin from the northeast. The challenge facing us was to augment the already excellent geochronology that existed for this sector of the former British-Irish Ice Sheet, ~4 young (out of ~30) radiocarbon ages on shells reworked into Irish Sea tills documenting the advance of ice south of Ireland. Optically stimulated luminescence ages for sand grains in outwash deposits on the south coast and in the Screen Hills north of Wexford constrain the retreat of ice marginal positions. However there are then gaps in the geochronology to the north of Ireland, and the region is devoid of low altitude cosmogenic ages with most effort so far expended in the Blackstairs and Wicklow Mountains.

In the south our efforts (Day2) focused on the coastal exposures at Kilmore Quay where stratified outwash sands fill depressions in Irish Sea tills and have been deformed during over-ride by inland ice out of Ireland. We recovered four OSL samples targeting shallow and possible slack water lithofacies. On the south-eastern corner of Ireland between the Irish Sea and Lady’s Island Lake we encountered numerous granite boulders, sourced from local bedrock but transported short distances by ice. Though slightly sub-optimal, three of these were sampled and make an excellent cluster of age determinations with the OSL samples ~4 km to the west.

Up-ice, north of Wexford the coastline from Blackwater Harbour to Cahore Point offers 7.8km of difficult to rival exposure of the Quaternary stratigraphy. The winter storms and tides had rendered the cliff-line along the coast both unstable and very well exposed in equal measures. Drawing on the stratigraphical logs of Geoff Thomas and John Summers the OSL team made short work of the sequences (Day 2). Working north-to-south, accessing the coast northwards from Blackwater Harbour, after the tide allowed access, our sampling targeted rippled sands within stacked planar cross-stratified sands, probable bar-forms, in a thick >30m packages extending south of a marginal position (2) to the rear of Blackwater Head. The locations has been OSL dated previously to ~23.6 kyrs, with sampling targeting equivalent deposits exposed in quarry faces ~1km inland.

Earlier, the OSL team had split up for more rapid sampling, with Chiverrell and Burke accessing the sections from Knocknasilloge, and sampling south of the access point in a thick 25m package of outwash sands lying south of four ice marginal positions (4-7) identified by Thomas and Summers. Sampling targeted distal style deposition, with low energy rippled samples and falling flow regime finer drape laminations. Approximately 2.4km further north, around Ballyvaldon, Rachel Smedley (taking her first BriticeChrono sample) and Geoff Duller sampled the extensive 600-800m sequence of outwash sands fronting ice limit 9 north of the access point. The final samples in this section, were sampled north of Tinaberna, where outwash sands front limit position 11, and sit directly on consolidated Irish Sea till.

On the final morning (Day 5), heading north to Dublin, Chiverrell, Burke and Small visited Wicklow Point, to sample a subglacial channel system on the tip of the headland. The channel 20m wide in places and >10m in depth, has an undulating floor and exits to the sea and both end, thus can only really have formed beneath ice covering the headland. On the walk south from the golf course, two granite erratics were encountered sat on schist bedrock, but the contexts were poor for sampling. Instead we sampled quartz veins in the walls of the channel for cosmogenic nuclide dating. From here David headed to the north of Ireland and a ferry, with Rich and Matt sprinting west for some unfinished transect 5 business in County Clare and the Burren coastline.

Day 4 saw an assault on the north of the region, with half the team (Chiverrell, Ó Cofaigh, Duller and Smedley) focused on the embayment south of Bray Head yielding OSL samples from the top-set sands of inland delta near Kilpedder from a now dormant quarry. The coast at Greystones proved tricky to access with engineering works and erosion producing excellent exposures once we reached the beach from the northern end. The exposures described previously by McCabe and Ó Cofaigh, were for the most part similar to the published work, with a thinning wedge of subaqueous diamict lapping-off Bray Head. The notable differences were a 5-6m thick sequence of steep angle delta foreset sands and gravels, which were a capped by a more horizontally stratified set of sand and gravel described previously, but here interpreted as a topset deposit. Thus the only differences to the previous interpretation are for the sequence to include a sub-aerial component as the delta broke the water surface of the subaqueous basin. OSL sampling targeted a very precariously located sand unit at the base of the top-set. In the afternoon, our team merged again and attention then turned to Bray Head and the search for glacially scoured bedrock and erratic boulders. One of the highlights of the trip! A delightful granite erratic sat on quartzite bedrock, within 100m we located striated and smoothed quartzite on the stoss side of a roche moutonnée and adjacent plucked surfaces on the lee side. Together the three locations have to potential to tie down the retreat chronology northwards.

Finally, north of Dublin at Howth, (Day 4) three of the team (Scourse, Burke and Small) an ice proximal delta is exposed in a former quarry and road cut showing shallow angle sand and gravel fore-sets capped by gravel top-sets. OSL sampling targeted sandy units towards the top of the fore-set. Within 1km at the top of Howth Hill ice-scoured quartzite bedrock yielded two samples, and an apparently excellent fish and chip shop yielded lunch before they returned south to Bray Head.

Spaced over >100km south to north the samples hopefully will advance understanding of ice retreat on the west flank of the Irish Sea Ice Stream, parallel equivalent efforts in the east where sites extend from Scilly, Pembroke, Cardigan Bay, Llyn and Anglesey. Other activities on our travels in Ireland include planning and discussions in advance of the marine sampling in this sector in July 2014. Not satisfied with finishing off one transect, a delta sequence had been overlooked on the south coast of the Galway Bay Icestream (Transect 5) at Doolin, so Chiverrell and Burke completed a 500km round trip to box that one off. A very happy team ticked off a whole load objectives on this trip……

BRITICECHRONO Fieldwork on the Isle of Man ~ November 2013

The leaving of Heysham is nothing like the leaving of Liverpool

By Richard Chiverrell

For Transect 3 of BRITICECHRONO, THE Irish Sea East, north from the terrestrial component in Shropshire-Lancashire, much of the remainder will be be dealt with during the marine cruises. The Isle of Man is the clear exception with excellent terrestrial exposure of the Quaternary geology; it is an excellent candidate region for dating the decline of the ISIS. The Isle of Man occupies a position astride successive ice advances through the Irish Sea Basin and records evidence of fluctuations of ice in the Irish Sea basin. The glacial geology of the Isle of Man is extremely well known, and this knowledge forms the basis for recent BRITICECHRONO fieldwork on the Isle of Man.

Geomorphology of the Isle of Man (Thomas et al., 2006)

Team Isle of Man consisted of Richard Chiverrell, Matt Burke, Daniel Schillereff (all Liverpool University), and David Roberts (Durham University), with meticulous planning (and no hastily rearranged flights) the intrepid team took off for autumnal bedock, erratics, sands, Manx queenies, cliff sections, gravels, sands, buried soils (?), kettlehole basins and ground penetrating radar on 4^th to 9^th November 2013….. We divided the Island five sectors documenting the northwards retreat, a) the Plains of Malew and adjacent hills (the South); b) the Peel embayment (the Central Valley) and on the northern plain c) outwash deposits of the Shellag Formation (the initial retreat); d) ice marginal sandar deposits associated with the Orrisdale Formation ice marginal oscillations (previously dated by Ian Thrasher) and e) outwash deposits of the Jurby Formations lain down during a more substantial 2-3km readvance. Together geochronology from these sectors would document the phased retreat across the Isle of Man and secure the timing of two well defined readvance episodes (Orrisdale and Jurby events).

Day 1 Monday – Travel and reccie day for some: Roberts, Dave, was first to arrive, apparently having set off before dawn, from whence he set gainfully on reacquainting himself with some former haunts, having spent a happy 12 months on the Island as a post doc in the mid- to late 1990’s. A very good day followed, bedrock sites on the southern flanks of Man, and a search for the famous Foxdale erratic train….. Meanwhile following a 9am lecture to the second years on European peat climate records, Chiverrell (Rich) tried to find his unusually elusive postdoc, Burke (Matt) who had been set the not insignificant challenge of cramming too much equipment into a car that had now seen better days. But second success of the day followed, 2x GPR antennae, 1x RTK Trimble GPS, tripods and staffs, monolith tins, 3x gamma detectors, the Roberts Rocksaw and cosmo kit, luminescence tubes and gearing, plus two scientists, can fit….  Third success, catching the boat from Heysham to Douglas, only 60 mins early for check in this time….. By 10.30 we had all collected in Andreas in the far north of the Islands, via in Dave’s case some old haunts in Douglas and a fine meal in the Sulby Glen Hotel for Matt and Rich.

Day 2 Tuesday – The Plain of Malew: The excellent recognisance by Dave helped us make short work of the very south of the Island. Bedrock samples a quartz arenite and quartz vein (sample 1 and 2) from Cregneash Peninsula overlooking the Calf of Man, where ice skirting the western flank of the Island has scoured and streamlined the topography and permission given by a very helpful landowner. The search for outwash sand and gravels for OSL proved slightly more taxing, with in the late afternoon a former bedrock quarry near Ronaldsway airport, Turkeyland Quarry, yielding a thin outwash deposit (sample 3) and a very enigmatic buried weathered soil, possible 14C target. And a fine dinner of Manx queenies and skate courtesy of chefs Matt and Dave. The final member, Schillereff (Dan), of the team flew in that evening to provide expertise on the kettlehole sediments, and revisit what might have been the locale for his undergraduate dissertation.

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Day 3 Wednesday – The Foxdale Granites and moving northwards:With permission from Manx National Heritage (Isle of Man Government) in order, the ‘holy grail’ site for BriticeChrono was very quickly lined up, the Foxdale granites. Ice flowing north to south penetrated through valleys from Glen Maye and Foxdale valley building to eventually bury and consume the Isle of Man. In Foxdale at the col at the head of the valley (~200m) a granitoid is exposed, and the erratic train holds a place of significance in the geological literature, including the attention of Charles Darwin (1842) as a classic example of transport of glacial boulders from low to higher ground including the summit of South Barrule. With the permission and assistance of Manx National Heritage several boulders were identified on the slopes of South Barrule near an Iron Age hillfort, 260-190m upslope and 1km distant from outcrop (samples 4 and 5). Foxdale granite is quite tough; boy did they take some chiselling. The four cosmogenic nuclide samples proposed for the Isle of Man form a coherent group in the south of the Island and a strong altitudinal gradient from 480m to 135m. There have been no previous attempts to obtain CN ages for the Isle of Man. Second success of the day, was Dan finding his kettlehole, perhaps not unexpected though given there are two on that stretch of coast with very similar stratigraphy. With the cosmogenic samples in the boot, Dave took his leave and departed for the UK.

Day 4 Thursday – the Central Valley, Kirk Michael and Orrisdale: With Dave gone, OSL sampling was very much to the fore. First up the Central Valley of the Isle of Man extending Peel in the west to Douglas in the east, where geomorphology shows moraine ridges arcing north and northeast indicating penetration of ice from the coast. The Ballaharra sand and gravel quarry shows a 12m sequence comprising basal 12-4m gently dipping fore-set planar sands and massive stratified gravels overlain by an upper (4-0m) top-set channel of horizontally stratified gravels with interbeds of planar and planar rippled sands. Western sectors of the current exposures are dominated by glacial diamicts and testify to an ice marginal setting. The sequence described is an ice proximal delta, with an ice contact slope immediately behind the worked exposures (samples 6 and 7). The late morning, saw a confrontation with high tides, the tides won. Slightly later, we began our run through the three retreat stage formations exposed on the Northern Plain of the Isle of Man. First Shellag Formation outwash at Kirk Michael (sample 8), with us filling the time taken to collect gamma dosimetry with sample the Kirk Michael (KM3/4) kettlehole deposits for our tephrachronologists to search for Icelandic volcanic ash layers. The KM3/4 kettlehole includes a basal cold stage lake muds that predate the lateglacial warming (sample 9). The Orrisdale Formation on the Island is quite well dated, with Ian Thrasher’s research, but we selected the northern most sandur trough in the sequence for further work (sample 10-11).

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Day 5 Friday – Jurby Readvance and the Dog Mills: The final day of OSL sampling, we tackled the Jurby Readvance, with two good lithofacies in off-lapping readvance over-ride sequence 3 (samples 12-13), just below a phenomenally well exposure kettlehole, including a prograding delta into the basin (one for the Quaternary community to revisit). The last sample of the day, on the east coast, the Dog Mills proglacial lagoonal sands (sample 14). Thus the sampling over 4-5 days spans the entire retreat sequence on the Isle of Man and two readvance episodes.

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Day 6 Saturday – Bride and seeing what you can do with GPR: With everything complete samples wise, the spare day was just that and with a 19.30 hours departure giving us some leisure time….. What do two Quaternary Geologists with a day spare? Well with 2x GPR antennae and a GPS set up, we assess the performance of GPR for Irish Sea glacigenic lithologies using the Bride Moraine, arguably one of the best if not the best exposure of glacitectonics on the NW European Archipelago. Do we need to know the internal structure of Bride?; well we could just go and look at the 60-80m high cliff sections or read a GSP Thomas paper for that. Again with helpful landowners guiding the way, we gained access to the cliff-tops above Bride, and surveyed 2.5km of the most undulating glacigenic terrain you could hope to meet. The very promising results in hand; we then also set sail for home…..

Luminescence dating sampling at Cherry Orchard Farm, near Delamere

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By Richard Chiverrell

Another day and another quarry, but this time the BriticeChrono Terrestrial team Rich Chiverrell and Matt Burke met up with some friends, with luminescence dating team Geoff Duller and Holly Wynne from Aberystwyth and stratigraphic geru Geoff Thomas to tackle the delights of rural Cheshire, Transect 3. Breaking all the rules for BriticeChrono quarry investigations the sun was out and not a snowflake in sight or site for that matter. Cherry Orchard Farm is one of a series of sand and gravel quarries to the east of the mid-Cheshire Sandstone Ridge, recently sampled for cosmogenic nuclide (CN) dating.

The site (location 17 on the map) makes an intriging pair with cosmogenic nuclide location ‘Urchin’s Kitchen’ (location 16), a deeply incised bedrock channel eroded subglacially. We hope to compare the performance of luminescence and CN dating techniques with pairings like this. The setting contains numerous the active and former sand and gravel extraction sites around Delamere Forest, and is located on an extensive (8x5km) gently undulating triangular terrace or bench raised >10m above the floodplains of the Weaver Basin. The terrace is fed by channels flowing from the Sandstone Ridge and presumably a former ice margin on the southern edge of zone 5 (see the map).

Quarry operator (Richard Wilding) was fanastically co-operative and allowed us full access to the sections which reveal shallow water sandur and fine-grained glaciolacustrine sands. The sands were a dream to sample, well sorted, stratified, the right grain size for luminescence dating and with excellent exposure throughout the section. Four samples were taken arrayed vertically through the sequence, though probably almost identical in age given the depositional environment, we sampled different lithofacies or depositional environments. The lengthly process was completed in 5 hours, it takes 60 minutes to record the gamma dosimetry (with a field gamma spectrometer) for each sample, which gave plenty of time for discussion, strategy and logging. Then for some differing journeys home, it can’t take that long to drive to Aberystwyth can it?! Can’t wait for the dates and the next phase of sampling on transect 3…..

Rapid retreat of the Irish Sea Ice Stream – just out in the Journal of Quaternary Science

A new paper has just been published by Richard Chiverrell and a hefty team of Britice-Chrono co-workers (James Scourse, Katrien van Landeghem, Chris Clark, Colm O Cofaigh, Dave Evans, Danny Mccarroll, Colin Ballantyne) presenting the first Bayesian integration and modelling of all the dating control for the marine sectors of the largest ice stream that the last British-Irish Ice Sheet ~ 24,000 years ago. The modelling shows very rapid retreat for this marine-terminating ice stream over greater distances (650 km) and timescales (8000 years) than is available from short term (decadal) observations of present day ice stream margins. The modelling shows this retreat 24,000 years ago was rapid and linked with climatic warming, sea-level rise, mega-tidal amplitudes and reactivation of meridional circulation in the North Atlantic. But, significantly the pattern of retreat appears uneven with a pulsed pattern of retreat attributed to the passage of the ice stream between normal (sloping away from the ice margin) and adverse (sloping towards) ice bed gradients and changes in the geometry or marginal constriction of the ice stream. To read more click here.

The methodology and application kind of formed an important test case for Britice-Chrono as we attempt to constrain rates of and controls on marine ice stream retreat over millennial timescales for eight ice stream radiating out from the last British-Irish Ice Sheet. The methodology outlined in the paper will underpin and be used as a guide for our data collection for the wider British-Irish Ice Sheet. It would be quite good fun to play around with some of the available chronology for other ice streams…..

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