Glaciation of the North Sea Basin, Prof Mads Huuse

Since the end of the Eocene, Earth’s climate has largely been in an ice house state with glaciation on the poles and varying intensity of glaciation at lower latitudes, as far south as the Isles of Scilly during the late Pleistocene. The study of glacial deposits in NW Europe is centuries old and Darwin famously recognised erratics and landforms as caused by extensive glaciations. Despite intense scrutiny of the glacial record onshore over the past centuries, the knowledge of glaciation history beyond the last 3 glaciations, 0.5 Ma, is extremely sparse, leaving many unknowns and apparently conflicting pieces of evidence, pitting researchers and country-scale records against each other. This talk will set the glacial record straight by drawing on the expanded, dated and well-imaged offshore record.
The imprints of glaciation reveal that the North Sea and surrounding landmasses were repeatedly glaciated from the onset of the Pleistocene at 2.5 Ma. This is revolutionary when compared with glacial histories and stories based on onshore records, which we now know only represents the last 20% of the Quaternary glacial history.