Claims that Cairngorms were home to a glacier just 400 years ago
The Cairngorms continue to intrigue. Now the famous mountains may change history - even prehistory.
A team of geographers have stated the strath’s famous range has a momentous claim to fame: that, far from melting away 11,000 years ago as the science books have long maintained, Scotland was home to a glacier as recently as four centuries ago.
Academics are claiming it could prove a major leap forward in reconstructing climate change in Scotland over its last few centuries.
But "Mr Cairngorms" - Dr Adam Watson - is disputing the evidence.
The revelation came after Dundee University’s Dr Martin Kirkbride teamed up with Jez Everest, of the British Geological Survey, Edinburgh and colleagues Doug Benn, Delia Gheorghiu and Alastair Dawson to publish a paper entitled "Late-Holocene and Younger Dryas glaciers in the northern Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland."
The work is currently being carried in The Holocene, a "high impact, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to fundamental scientific research at the interface between the long Quaternary record and the natural and human-induced environmental processes operating at the Earth’s surface today."
Or, in layman’s terms, the pulication emphasizes environmental change over the last 11,500 years or so.
The team used "cosmogenic 10Be dating" to show that a small glacier in a Cairngorm corrie pushed up granite boulders to form moraine ridges within the last few centuries, during a period of cooling climate.
With the help of cosmic rays from deep space, the team have worked out that moraines were formed in only the last two millennia, with the climate at its most severe as recently as 1650-1790.
At the same time, Aberdeenshire ecologist Adam Watson - the foremost expert on the range - the rocks were not moraine pushed up by a glacier, but a protalus rampart.
According to Dr Watson it’s far more elementary, with the rampart fed annually by boulders, soil, vegetation and other debris coming down in avalanches.
He has told the Mountaineering Council of Scotland that Dr Kirkbride’s scientific paper was "typical of studies by geomorphologists who fail to dig a single soil pit and ignore fundamental principles of soil science".
Others had made claims of a glacier in another part of the Cairngorms, Garbh Choire Mor, but snow patches rarely survived throughout the year there, whereas in Garbh Choire Mor the patches almost always survived - making it the most likely site for a glacier in Scotland.
