Coastal Heritage at Walton-on-the-Naze

Main >> Travel and Tourism >> My Travel Experience

Coastal Heritage at Walton-on-the-Naze - Saving the Naze Cliffs

Coastal Heritage - East Coast of England - Essex

Naze Cliffs: Erosion & Geology

The Power of the Sea - Walton-on-the-Naze

HOME

PAGE

TOWN

SITE

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Geologic Time Scale Notes:

CENOZOIC ERA - "THE AGE OF MAMMALS" - 65 million years ago to the present time - two 'periods', seven 'epochs'...

___________________________________________

QUATERNARY PERIOD: 1.8 m yr - today (RED CRAG)

Holocene: 11,000 yr - today (HUMAN CIVILIZATION)

Pleistocene: 1.8m - 11,000 yr (ICE AGE, mammoth, MAN)

TERTIARY PERIOD: 65m - 1.8m yr

Pliocene: 5m - 1.8m yr (MEGALODON giant shark)

Miocen: 24m - 5m yr (horses, dogs , bears & modern birds)

Oligocene: 38m - 24m yr (pigs, deer, cats, grassland)

Eocene: 54m - 38m yr (rodents, whales, LONDON CLAY)

Paleocene: 65m - 24m yr (first large mammals, primitive apes)

___________________________________________

new! FIELD STUDY INFO... new!

CLIFF EROSION DIAGRAMS

THE NAZE PROTECTION SOCIETY:

AGM | PROJECT | FUNDS | APPEAL 2006

BLOGS

Walton &

the Naze

NATURAL ENGLAND: CLIFF STATEMENT

BBC: NAZE HERITAGE COAST WALK

TENDRING DIST C: RESCUE PLANS

NAZE STORM SURGE

Gallery - November 2007

_________________________________________________

"Erosion of the Naze" Notes:

The facts for £2! Updated infopack with erosion rates; from NPS shop & Naze Tower

Geology Notes:

The Red Crag Cliffs [video description] are a soft geological layer about 2 million years old containing the remains of shells whose modern descendants today live in the Pacific Ocean. (The sea in this region was once connected to the Pacific via the Bering Straight.) Although Red Crag occurs across much of north Essex, it is only at Walton-on-the-Naze that this ancient sand bank is well exposed. The range of Red Crag Fossils here show how the world was cooling ahead of the last ice-age. The Red Crag - topped with sedimentary layers of glacial sands and silts - sits uneasily upon the slippery impervious London Clay that was deposited around 50 million years ago as a sea bed, when mammals were becoming common. Here are Eocene Fossils of driftwood, sharks teeth and the remains of turtles, indicating that the Naze was then part of a tropical sea. More importantly, a proliferation of bird fossils has recently been discovered in these clay deposits. Thin layers of volcanic ash - possibly originating from Scotland - indicate periods of intense volcanic activity that probably coincided with the splitting of the Earth's original huge single northern continental land mass into America and Eurasia to form the Atlantic Ocean.

Autumn '05/Spring '06:

A concrete wartime RAF hut base about to collapse close by the Links Cafe - and a small cliff slump has occurred near the Tower.

click on thumbnail image for pictures:

Spring 2005:

Two small 'rotational slumps' occured in February and March. These have taken place just north of the Naze Tower and represent an area of about twelve square metres in lost land. When the weather turns wet the weakened ground will inevitably result in further mud slides.

click on thumbnail images for pictures: v

Bird Fossils:

The London Clay deposits are the reason why the Naze has become a site of international importance, for they contain the best preserved bird fossils of Tertiary age to be found anywhere in the world. Over 600 species have been found, including the ferocious Phorusrhacos, a cockerel-sized bird with a fierce hooked beak that later evolved to become an eight foot flightless carnivore. The huge concentration of bird fossils in the Eocene beds at the Naze may be due to a volcanic or meteorite explosion that caused intense heat and wholesale mortality. Volcanic glass has been found to support this theory.

Rotational Slump

click on diagram for text

Mud Slide

click on diagram for text

Glaciation Notes:

For tens of millions of years - ever since the days of the dinosaurs - the temperature of prehistoric Essex had been dropping from balmy tropical to cool temperate. Then, two million years ago, the Ice Age started. At this time the mighty Thames flowed from the Welsh mountains, to the north of London, through north Essex and then as a tributary into the even mightier River Rhine - now the southern North Sea. About half a million years ago a severe cold stage allowed a great ice sheet to spread south as far as the Thames, blocking its northerly path and diverting it south to its present course. This period is known as the Anglian Glaciation. Fifty thousand years later there followed a warm stage known as Hoxnian Interglacial. During this time Neanderthals made their way north from Europe to take advantage of the change of climate. However, things got colder again for the next three hundred thousand years until an even warmer period begun 120,000 years ago. This period is known as the Ipswichian Interglacial. The climate of Essex became sub-tropical allowing monkeys, elephants and lions into the region. However, man was absent from Briain at this time, probably because the melting of the ice sheet had caused the reappearance of the English Channel to bar the way back northwards. The Ice Age came to a climactic finale with the intense cold of the Devensian stage. Although this didn't reach as far south as the previous Anglian glaciation, its melt water run-off caused a spectacular network of 'ice wedge polygons' that are sometimes revealed by crop markings in Essex fields during hot, dry summers. They were formed over the seasonal changes of thousands of years, whereby frozen ground shrank and cracked during the extreme cold of winter and filled with water during the summer, only to freeze and expand again the following winter, thus widening the cracks. As the Ice Age finally ended ten thousand years ago, these cracks filled with eroded debris which marks them out today as distinctive ice wedge 'casts'.