The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) has supported an understanding of the Irish Sea’s geological history, after analysing seabed mapping data collected under the Civil Hydrography Programme (CHP) to support safe navigation in waters between Ireland and North Wales.
Global cooling during the last glaciation, around 27,000 years ago, led to the formation of a vast ice sheet measuring 840,000km² which contained enough ice to raise global sea levels by 1.8 metres. The British-Irish Ice Sheet stretched from the Isles of Scilly to the Shetland Islands.
Analysis of the hydrographic data by the Scientific Analysis Group at the UKHO also revealed a series of remarkable well-preserved glacial landforms. These landforms on the seabed show thick, fast glacial ice – comparable in size to the glaciers found today in Antarctica – that once flowed through the centre of the Irish Sea basin more than 20,000 years ago.
“The ice sheet inundated Great Britain and Ireland with glacial ice several kilometres thick and was characterised by dendritic, or tree-like, ice flow,” said Laurence Dyke, Geospatial Information Specialist – Scientific Analysis Group, at the UKHO.
“A number of very large glaciers, known as ice streams, drained ice from the mountainous areas down to the ocean, calving icebergs into the Atlantic. These huge marine-terminating outlet glaciers flowed at speeds of several kilometres a year, analogous to the largest glaciers in present-day Greenland and Antarctica.”
Insight into the Irish Sea’s glacial past was discovered during analysis of information gathered through a long-running data-collection initiative operated under the CHP and administered by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA).
Under the CHP, the MCA contracts hydrographic survey companies to collect accurate information. Experts at the UKHO provide technical oversight and data validation, which is used to update the nation’s nautical charts and publications to ensure they remain current, safe and fit for purpose. The data from the Irish Sea was collected as part of Hydrographic Instruction 1706.
Once gathered, all hydrographic information such as data density, interline consistency, geodetic parameters and tidal observations goes through the UKHO’s rigorous quality assurance process before being validated. It is then archived in the UKHO’s bathymetric database, ready for inclusion on nautical charting products.
The UKHO reviews the latest charts, updating them where necessary with the latest collection of high-quality bathymetry information. The collected data from the CHP is distributed across the UK government to uphold the ‘collect once, use many times’ approach to gathering and sharing information.
