Kentish Catastrophes
                                       
Jill Abery

   A gravel quarry in Kent has recently been the scene of a find that is
   extremely difficult to explain in conventional geological terms.
   Gravel deposits can be the remains of old sea beaches or river banks,
   in which case they consist of well-sorted, clean gravel. They can also
   be deposits of mixed dirt and stones left behind after the retreat of
   a glacier. Kent, however, has many of a third sort, very mixed
   deposits, not associated with the old Thames or Medway river beds and
   not explicable as glacier deposits, for the "Ice Age" ice sheets did
   not extend south of the Thames estuary. These gravels, known as "head"
   deposits, are explained as the accumulation of a slow downward flow of
   surface materials, repeatedly frozen and thawed out each year while
   the area was on the fringes of a glaciation.

   One of these deposits, near Faversham, has been quarried for fifteen
   or more years and consists of large, mixed flints and general finer
   debris. Associated with the flints are many echinoderm (sea-urchin)
   fossils, a "normal" find in the layers of flints found in the upper
   Cretaceous chalk beds which form the bed rock of this area of the
   country. On an orthodox basis the Faversham deposits must have been
   derived from surface breakdown of a chalk bed exposed during the last
   glaciation.

   The first orthodox problem of this, and similar deposits, is that they
   also contain many remains of "Ice Age" mammals. Bones and teeth of
   rhinoceros, mammoth, bison, deer and horse are found so frequently as
   to merit no comment. Such animals would not be living in the tundra
   conditions at the edge of the ice, therefore their remains must have
   originated from the previous "Interglacial" period when temperate
   conditions prevailed. Mammoth and bison leg bones obtained from the
   quarry are not fossilised, yet, apart from breaks, are in a good state
   of preservation. If they were lying on the surface, to move slowly
   downhill with frost-shattered surface material, it would be expected
   that they would have suffered much disintegration themselves.

   The recent find raises even more difficulties. About fifteen feet
   down, the quarrymen have struck a solid stone layer, about one to two
   feet thick, which they have broken up in places in order to reach the
   gravel beneath. The stone would therefore appear to have been formed
   in situ during the same period as the gravel. The stone is a hard
   cemented sandstone of a similar nature, as far as can be ascertained,
   as sarsen stones which are found in various places in surface deposits
   in southern England and western Europe and were much used in the
   building of megalithic monuments. Although a lot of work has
   apparently been done on the chemical and physical nature of such
   stone, it is obvious that the experts still have no idea of how, where
   or when such formations came into existence. It depends on silica
   being deposited out of solution in order to bind the original sand
   grains together and over half a dozen theories as to how this could
   take place have been put forward. It is notable that they all involve
   slow processes; also, of seven different physical changes which can
   result in silica being de- posited out of solution, the one
   arbitrarily dismissed is cooling, the temperatures involved being
   considered far too high. Catastrophic-type electrical discharges,
   producing high temperatures, are naturally not among the
   uniformitarian's explanatory armoury. However, evidence for a quite
   rapid formation is the frequent presence of holes, thought to show the
   presence of roots or small animal burrows. The Faversham quarry not
   only shows such holes but is also of a most contorted nature, varying
   from a cobbled appearance to the smooth whorls produced from an icing
   bag (see drawing). A thick slurry of sand would not hold these shapes
   for long. Therefore it would appear that the cementation process in
   this case must have been very rapid and occurred halfway through
   whatever process caused the gravel to pile up in this place.

   [*!* Image]]

   [Caption: Small discrete lump
   Example of sandstone block from quarry. Some pieces viewed were 6 ft.
   across and were only bits broken off larger section.]

   The whole geology of south-east England gives rise to several
   conflicting theories of landscape formation, but what is self-evident
   is that, since the formation of the chalk there have been several
   major changes in sea level, at least some being very rapid as
   evidenced by the presence of both raised beaches and drowned forests.
   Some deposits show evidence of at least local catastrophes such as
   bands of carbonaceous material, clay layers crowded with fossil shells
   and bands of iron-stained nodules crowded with plant remains. The
   cliffs of the Isle of Sheppey in particular seem difficult to explain
   through any gradual process. They are composed of clay, which means
   that their formation took place by means of silt falling out of very
   slowly-moving water. Usually such clay deposits show layering effects
   due to seasonal variations over many years, but the Sheppey cliffs
   show little sign of this, and contain an enormous variety of fossils
   including plants, many orders of marine invertebrates, fish, reptiles,
   birds and land mammals and large pieces of wood. They are also being
   eroded away at a visibly rapid rate by the combined action of sea at
   the foot, and springs at the top, which infers that their 200-foot
   rise above the present sea level must have been very recent. Yet
   despite all this evidence the "experts" are still coming up with
   conflicting ideas, all based on uniformitarian principles, invoking
   ice ages and tectonic movements (slow ones, that is) to explain away
   what is far more easily explicable as catastrophic.
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