The last of Britain’s glaciers melted 10,000 years ago, but the way they shaped the landscape still affects our lives today. Locations of towns and cities have been determined by which direction those giant rivers of ice flowed; tourists flock to see the picturesque lakes and hills sculpted by their brute force, and gardeners curse soils with an overabundance of glacial clay.
Now those ancient ice sheets are reminding us of their existence out at sea too, influencing which locations are suitable for offshore windfarms. Gareth Carter, a marine geoscientist at the British Geological Survey, has been using subsurface imagery to map the land under the North Sea and advising engineers where to site their foundations for the huge Dogger Bank Wind Farm, 80 miles (130km) off the north-east coast of England.
“Glacial sediments are highly variable, ranging from layered soft silts and clays, deposited in a lake formed by meltwater in front of the melting ice sheet, through to incredibly hard, chaotic and contorted deposits, dumped by a departing ice sheet,” he says.
As windfarms move to ever deeper waters and rely on innovative anchor technologies to hold floating turbines in place, Carter and his colleagues are finding themselves in ever more demand, helping engineers to avoid troublesome boulders and identify suitable ground for foundations.
