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At the invitation of the University of East Anglia and of Professor B. M. Funnell of the School of Environmental Sciences, the Eleventh Regional Meeting of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society was held at Norwich.

The topic of the Meeting, “The Engineering Geology of the Quaternary Deposit”, is an important subject for there can be few construction sites in the northern continents where the engineering geology has no legacy from the Quaternary. This legacy may be directly or indirectly due to Pleistocene events, either directly in the form of glacial deposits or indirectly as a result of the associated periglacial conditions or lowered sea level in regions beyond the ice limits. The subsequent Holocene rise of sea level resulted in extensive estuarine deposits.

The Quaternary theme was a particularly happy one in view of the East Anglian venue for the Meeting, for Quaternary deposits cover much of the region and are exposed, though sadly less well so than in the past, in coastal sections.

An innovation for this Regional Meeting was two seminars, one on ‘The geology of glacial deposits’ by Dr G. S. Boulton of the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and another on ‘The soil mechanics of glacial deposits’ by Dr N. E. Simons of the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Surrey. The seminars were held at the same time, and took the form of informal lectures with discussion designed to present the basic principles of the subjects for non-specialists.

Article

The Pleistocene history of the Fenland river basins

A. Horton (Institute of Geological Sciences)

The nature of the drift in the Fenland river basins reflects repeated variations from cold to temperate climate conditions. Fall in sea level during the glacial periods resulted in overdeepening of river valleys. Outlets of valleys 30 to 60 m deeper than at present were blocked by the Chalky Boulder Clay ice-sheet, and lacustrine sediments were laid down in finger lakes. These deposits vary from thinly laminated varved sediments through alternating beds of sand, silt and clay to beds of unsorted sediment of boulder clay type. In addition to these types of deposits, boulder clays of Chalky Boulder Clay lithology are the most extensive deposits in the Fenland basin glacial sequence.

Modern rivers may have in part reexcavated their original valleys, but some blocked pre-glacial valleys occupy interfluves of modern rivers. Pleistocene terrace gravels occur in all Fenland valleys.

Genetic influences on the engineering properties of tills

A. McGown (Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of Strathclyde) and E. Derbyshire (Dept. of Geography, University of Keele).

Tills, while collectively distinguishable from other engineering soils, are inherently very variable, and individual till deposits can behave quite distinctively. This can be related to the somewhat differing geological histories of the deposits and to variations in many other, often derived, properties of tills. It is thus submitted that establishing the geological history of any till will, when its modes of formation, transportation, deposition and post-depositional processing are all considered, produce

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