A Dundee University researcher has found evidence that a glacier was still in place in Scotland within the last 400 years some 11,000 years more recently than previously thought.
Conventional wisdom said Britain’s last glaciers melted around 11,500 years ago, but geographer Dr Martin Kirkbride says his findings show a glacier was in place at Coire an Lochain in the Cairngorms possibly as recently as the 18th century.
Using a technique called cosmogenic 10Be dating, Dr Kirkbride has shown that a small glacier in a Cairngorm corrie piled up granite boulders to form moraine ridges within the last few centuries, during the period of cool climate known as the Little Ice Age.
“Our laboratory dating indicates that the moraines were formed within the last couple of thousand years, which shows that a Scottish glacier existed more recently than we had previously thought,” said Dr Kirkbride.
Dr Kirkbride teamed up with Dr Jez Everest at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, and the Cosmogenic Isotope Analysis Facility at the Scottish Universities Environmental Reactor Centre in East Kilbride, to carry out the research.
Dr Everest said: “This is exciting news, as for the first time we have shown that climatic conditions in Scotland allowed glaciation within the last half millennium, at a time when other glaciated areas, such as Scandinavia, Iceland and the Alps saw their glaciers grow to some of their largest sizes since the end of the last Ice Age.
“This has great importance when we start to reconstruct climate change in Scotland and the wider region over the last few centuries.”
The study, along with parallel research from scientists at Exeter and Aberystwyth universities, is published in the latest issue of the journal The Holocene.
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