Glaciers of the Mourne Mountains,N.Ireland

Research in the field of glacial geology over the past twenty years has dramatically improved our understanding of the growth and decay of the British and Irish Ice Sheet, primarily through the BRITICE and BRITICE-CHRONO projects. New understandings of glacial dynamics in the Mourne Mountains have also come about though mapping work by the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, as well as by research projects led by Queens University Belfast, University College Dublin and the University of New South Wales. Building on the seminal research by Marshall McCabe in the early 2000s, this recent research has provided us with further age constraints for the deglaciation of valley glaciers in the Mournes, as well as an understanding of local ice cap dynamics through numerical modelling. Rather than being fed by an ice building up on the mountains themselves, glaciers flowing out of the Mourne Mountains in the Annalong Valley and Silent Valley are thought to have been supplied by a large ice dome centred over Lough Neagh. Late-glacial (Nahanagan stadial) corrie glaciers similar to those identified in the Wicklow Mountains are not thought to have been found in the Mournes.