Timing and depositional environments of a Middle Pleistocene glaciation of northeast England: New evidence from Warren House Gill, County Durham

Abstract

At various times during the Quaternary, north-eastern England was a zone of confluence between dynamic ice lobes sourced from the Pennines, northern Scotland, the Cheviots, and Scandinavia. The region thus has some of the most complex exposures of Middle to Late Pleistocene sediments in Britain, with both interglacial and glacial sediments deposited in terrestrial and marine settings. We investigated sedimentary sequences exposed on the coastline of County Durham at Warren House Gill, and present a new model of British and Fennoscandian Ice Sheet interaction in the North Sea Basin during the Middle Pleistocene.The stratigraphy at Warren House Gill consists of a lower diamicton and upper estuarine sediments, both part of the Warren House Formation. They are separated from the overlying Weichselian Blackhall and Horden tills by a substantial unconformity. The lower diamicton of the Warren House Formation is re-interpreted here as an MIS 8 to 12 glaciomarine deposit containing ice-rafted lithics from north-eastern Scotland and the northeast North Sea, and is renamed the 'Ash Gill Member'. It is dated by lithological comparison to the Easington Raised Beach, Middle Pleistocene Amino Acid Racemisation values, and indirectly by optically stimulated luminescence. The overlying shallow subaqueous sediments were deposited in an estuarine environment by suspension settling and bottom current activity. They are named the 'Whitesides Member', and form the uppermost member of the Warren House Formation. During glaciation, ice-rafted material was deposited in a marine embayment. There is no evidence of a grounded, onshore Scandinavian ice sheet in County Durham during MIS 6, which has long been held as the accepted stratigraphy. This has major implications for the currently accepted British Quaternary Stratigraphy. Combined with recent work on the Middle Pleistocene North Sea Drift from Norfolk, which is now suggested to have been deposited by a Scottish ice sheet, the presence of a Scandinavian ice sheet in eastern England Quaternary Science Reviews 44 (2012), 180-212 2 at any time during the Quaternary is becoming increasingly doubtful.

Middle to Late Devensian glaciation of north‐east Scotland: implications for the north‐eastern quadrant of the last British–Irish ice sheet

“…Specifically, heavy mineral assemblages diagnostic of the Grampian Highlands and the north-east coast of Scotland, together with Late Jurassic palynomorphs sourced from the Moray Firth Basin or from northern England, have been identified in the Swarte Bank, Fisher and Bolders Bank formations of MIS 12, 6 and 2 respectively. A broadly similar suite has also been identified in the Horden Till of the Durham coast and the Skipsea Till of eastern Yorkshire, which were deposited by the North Sea Ice Lobe of the last BIIS during the Dimlington Stadial (Davies et al, 2009(Davies et al, , 2012. It has been difficult to reconcile this recurring south-eastward trajectory from the Moray Firth with ice sheet reconstructions placing low ice divides stretching across the central North Sea Basin between Scotland and Norway (Davies et al, 2011, fig.11; Busfield et al, 2015, fig.7).…”

Quaternary glaciations of northern Europe

“…Critically, the glaciogenic deposits upon which the Wolstonian Glaciation was identified were shown in Perrin et al (1979) to be part of the same association of deposits as those considered to be of Anglian age further east, and the associated Wolstonian fluviatile deposits that underlie the glaciogenic sediment have been shown to be pre-Anglian in age (Rose, 1987(Rose, , 1994 rather than younger than Anglian as proposed by Shotton (1976Shotton ( , 1983. Traces of other late Middle Pleistocene glaciations were still identified at specific localities in east Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Durham (Catt and Penny, 1966;Davies et al, 2012), and reference to these sites and their significance can be found in Bowen et al (1986) which also allocates the glaciations to geochronometric ages and Marine Isotope Stages. Thus the most extensive glaciation of Britain was considered to have occurred during MIS 12, and subsequent late Middle Pleistocene glaciations are interpreted as occurring during MIS 8 (in south Wales) in the west Midlands and eastern England, reaching positions just beyond the limit of the Last Glaciation (Bowen et al, 1986) ( Figure 4B).…”

“…As a result of a detailed OSL dating programme reported in this paper, and existing radiocarbon dates (Ó Cofaigh and Evans, 2007), it is demonstrated that the palaeoshoreline formed during MIS 4-3 with a level determined by glacio-isostatic deformation, and that the glacial deposits previously considered to have formed prior to the Last Glaciation were formed by a rapid and short lived advance (surge) around 24 ka BP. Ireland was therefore almost completely submerged beneath the ice sheet of the Last (MIS 2) Glaciation.The issue of pre-MIS 2 glaciations is examined in the paper by Davies et al (2012) which provides a detailed examination of the earlier part of the stratigraphic sequence at a long-studied site in northeast England. The site in question (Warren House Gill in County Durham) has been known for pre-LGM till and raised beach deposits and has been interpreted as evidence for Scandinavian-sourced glaciation of eastern England in MIS 6.…”

“…Quaternary Science Reviews 44, 1-25. [Pre-proof accepted manuscript] 16 grounded ice although whether the two ice sheets were confluent is not known Sejrup et al, 2003;Graham, 2007;Davies et al, 2012).The North Sea was glaciated for a final time during the Late Weichselian (MIS 2). Well-developed seismic, geomorphological and sedimentological evidence now exists for the coalescence of both the Scandinavian and British ice sheets in the northern North Sea (Carr et al, 2006;Bradwell et al, 2007;Graham et al, 2007Graham et al, , 2009Bradwell et al, 2008c) (Figure 3) with ice reaching its maximum extent at the continental margin around 29 ka BP (Sejrup et al, 2009).…”

“…Several studies have also recently employed the use of derived micro-fossils together with erratic clast lithologies to reconstruct local ice flow paths (Lee et al, 2002;Riding et al, 2003;Davies et al, 2011Davies et al, , 2012. Till fabric analyses, though also used in the area of the SIS (Ehlers and Stephan 1983), are more frequently used to study the smaller and the more morphology-controlled British glaciation (West and Donner, 1956;Rose, 1974), and studies of the varying granulometric characteristics have also contributed to the interpretation the glaciation of Britain (Perrin et al, 1979).…”