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II. On a Section of the Lower Chalk near Ely*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

Harry Seeley
Affiliation:
Woodwardian Museum, Cambridge.

Extract

Ely stands on a hill extending somewhat beyond the city as a ridge to the north; and a mile north-east of the Cathedral, at a spot variously named Roslyn or Roswell Hole, its flank is reached at a well-known pit, where the Kimmeridge Clay is dug for mending the river-banks; and the excavation shows some Boulder-clay and Chalk. What the relative positions and relations of these latter deposits may be has been long disputed; some holding that the Chalk is there in sitû, let down by a fault; others maintaining that it is merely such a drifted mass, included in the Boulder-clay, as those which form so strange a feature in the Drift of the Norfolk Coast.† Professor Sedgwick has long been convinced that this latter view is a groundless hyothesis; for when the railway was made from Ely to Lynn, it exposed at about 100 yards off a section showing Kimmeridge Clay and Chalk side by side, and Boulder-clay between them; so the conclusion inevitably followed that there had been a great fault; letting down the Chalk for at least two or three hundred feet. This section was still to be seen in the spring of 1860, when I examined it. The faulted faces of both stratified formations were perfectly erect, parted by a column of Boulder-clay, some twelve feet wide, which from a distance looked like a basaltic dyke.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1864

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Footnotes

*

This paper was read, February 16, 1863, before the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

References

The figures given in Sir C. Lyell's ‘Elements,’ p. 129, are not included pinnacles of Chalk, but only reconstructed chalky drift, full of all sorts of rocks. Last summer I found a grand boulder SE of Cromer, 180 feet long, and in shape like half a pear, fairly in the Boulder-clay. It was of soft Chalk; and the flints were cracked, but less than those of Freshwater.Google Scholar