OLDER AND NEWER DRIFT IN EAST YORKSHIRE

Abstract

( Presidential Address, November, 1939 ). INTRODUCTION The drift deposits of Yorkshire, in common with those of most other areas, consist in the main of boulder-clay and gravel, lying apparently haphazard on the solid rocks. At first sight they appear to be mere chaotic heaps and one can easily understand their original attribution to the Flood. It may well be that the student of these deposits is first attracted to the subject by a study of the literature, for there is a vast amount of popular or semi-popular reference to an “Ice Age.” The conception of vast ice-caps covering the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere and such sensational records as the preservation of mammoths in the ice of Siberia naturally lead the student away from the somewhat humdrum deposits which he is likely to meet locally and entice him to read the literature rather than to do fieldwork. In any case, we are confronted with so vast a field for investigation and our own observations appear so scattered, that we are obliged to take the current theory as a basis and fit our own little records as best we may into this theoretical framework. It so happens, however, that as the student widens his circle of knowledge he becomes aware that all the authorities do not speak with the same voice, and that indeed they show astonishing divergence even on what would appear to be fundamental points. So far as we are concerned in Yorkshire, we have to consider not only …