On the occurrence of shelly boulder clay and interglacial deposits in Kincardineshire

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Introduction. The object of the present communication is to give a preliminary account of certain drift sections of considerable interest which the writer has discovered recently in Kincardineshire. Much of the south-eastern part of that county is mantled with red boulder clay laid down by ice which was moving in a north-easterly direction from Strathmore or by fluvioglacial materials deposited during the retreat of the same ice-sheet. At Mill of Forest on the Carron Water, at Stonehaven Harbour and elsewhere the red boulder clay, with its characteristic content of Strathmore shales and marls, is underlain by a yellowish-brown to reddish-brown boulder clay in which the dominating constituent boulders are ‶newer″ granites and schists, and from which boulders of rocks of Old Red Sandstone age are completely or almost completely awanting. This lower boulder clay is clearly the stratigraphical equivalent of the ‶Lower Grey Boulder Clay″ of northern Kincardineshire and Aberdeenshire described by Dr Bremner1 and was deposited by an ice-sheet moving in a south-easterly direction. Further south, however, in the coastal tract between Inverbervie and St Cyrus, the lower boulder clay possesses markedly different characters. It is greyish-black in colour, contains an abundant assemblage of arctic shells and carries an unusual suite of boulders. Moreover the shelly boulder clay is sometimes separated from the overlying red boulder clay by interglacial deposits which, at one locality, include a thin bed of peat. In the present paper a short account of the shelly boulder clay is followed by descriptions of its stratigraphical

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: