Attention must now be directed to another series of facts which help
us to realise the general conditions that obtained during the epoch
of local glaciation. In the basin of the estuary of the Clyde, and at
various other places both on the west and east coasts of Scotland,
occur certain clays and sands, which overlie the upper boulder-clay,
and in some places are found wrapping round the kames and osar of
the last great ice-sheet. These beds are charged with the relics of
a boreal and arctic fauna, and indicate a submergence of rather more
than 100 feet. In the lower reaches of the rivers Clyde, Forth, and
Tay the clays and sands form a well-marked terrace, and a raised
sea-beach, containing similar organisms, occurs here and there on the
sea-coast, as between Dundee and Arbroath, on the southern shores of
the Moray Firth, and elsewhere. When the terraces are traced inland
they are found to pass into high-level fluviatile gravels, which may
be followed into the mountain-valleys, until eventually they shade off
into fluvio-glacial detritus associated with the terminal moraines of
the great local glaciers. It is obvious, in short, that the epoch of
local ice-sheets and large valley-glaciers was one also of partial
submergence. This is further shown by the fact that in some places the
glaciers that reached the sea threw down their moraines on the 100-feet
beach. It must have been an epoch of much floating ice, as the marine
deposits contain now and again many erratics, large and small, and are,
moreover, frequently disturbed and contorted as if from the grounding
of pack-ice.
The phenomena which I have thus briefly sketched suffice to show that
the epoch of local glaciation is to be clearly distinguished from that
of the latest general _mer de glace_. I have long suspected, indeed,
that the two may have been separated by as wide an interval of time
as that which divided the earlier from the later epoch of general
glaciation. Again and again I have searched underneath the terminal
moraines, in the faint hope of detecting interglacial accumulations. My
failure to discover these, however, did not weaken my conviction, for
it was only by the merest chance that interglacial beds could ever have
been preserved in such places. I feel sure, however, that they must
occur among the older alluvia of our Lowlands. Indeed, as I shall point
out in the sequel, it is highly probable that they are already known,
and that we have hitherto failed to recognise their true position in
the glacial series.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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