Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.38 P680274 Harmer being driven in his motor car by his chauffeur. Harmer wrote, 'my
later investigations, rendered possible to an old man by the fortunate invention of the motor car,
which literally gave me a new lease of geological life for field work (Harmer 1910). (From
Harmer's collection of photographs) (CP13/050 Reproduced by permission of the British
Geological Survey NERC. All rights reserved)
In 1910, in recognition of his renown as one of the leading authorities on the
geology of eastern England, Harmer was asked to contribute to the Jubilee Volume
of the Geologists' Association. In the two papers that followed Harmer took the
opportunity to carry out a comprehensive review of his research on the Pliocene
and Pleistocene epochs in East Anglia which he had undertaken during many
previous years.
The Frederic William Harmer Collection of Crag Mollusca (including material
figured in his Palaeontological Society Monographs) is included in the reference
material at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.
Harmer believed that the sculpturing of East Anglian landforms was mainly due
to the particular conditions associated with the melting of the ice sheet, conditions
which today have wholly ceased to exist. Writing in 1910, he thought that com-
paratively little erosion or deposition had occurred in this region since the final
disappearance of the ice and continued that the Cromer Ridge moraine may not
greatly differ in appearance from that which it presented when the ice left. He
stated that the boulder-clay plateaus of the higher parts of Norfolk and Suffolk are
as level as if some immense steam roller had recently passed over them and that no
great sheets of gravel are accumulating at present along our inland valleys, nor is
any river erosion now taking place; the valleys indeed are in fact being gradually
filled up with silt and alluvium. He concluded:
An era of geological rest has settled down on the fertile lands of East Anglia, and we now
enjoy in peace the fruits of the glacial disturbance and turmoil of the past.
However, Harmer would have been concerned with the present 'disturbance and
turmoil' of his once unspoilt surrounding countryside due, not this time to natural
