THE SECRET OF THE GLACIAL DRIFTS

Abstract

( Presidential Address, November, 1943). The Glacial Drifts of northern Britain are known to us all but too well. We cannot escape them; their clays, their sands and gravels confront us at every turn, so masking the underlying rock that they are a positive curse to the ‘solid’ geologist. As for the related literature remorselessly piled up over a full hundred years, its volume is by now ‘a thing imagination boggles at.’ Assuredly, one would think that with all this information little could have remained un-discovered. But not at all, for if we except those perennial breeders of strife, the Crystalline Schists, these Drifts continue to cause more wrangling, more bitter disputation than anything else in our science. What are the reasons for a state of affairs so humiliating to our intelligence? No doubt there are many, but two, at any rate, are outstanding. One is that although it is agreed that we are dealing with accumulations which, somehow or other, were left behind after the decay of the Pleistocene ice-sheets, modern instances of such a process are by no means fully known: the comparative data they might provide are far from complete. That may seem an odd statement to make, in view of the countless expeditions to icebound regions the world over, but, in truth, while the records brought back abound in adventure stories, in geographical and other observations, rarely do they help to satisfy our particular needs. Those needs are to know precisely how ice-sheets decay, and what is ...