March 2010 – Redcar Submerged Forest

In January and February of 2010, beach deposits at Redcar – in an area roughly extending between the Information Center and Park Hotel – were stripped away by tidal scour revealing some infrequently exposed beds beneath the usual sand and pebbles.

At the base of the steps opposite the Information Center, and extending seaward for over 100 metres, were exposed black peat beds, springy underfoot, packed with wood fragments and even tree trunks, some in growth position. This is the Redcar Submerged Forest (aka. Peat & Forest Beds). Other minor examples survive within the Lower Tees Valley, both underlying parts of Middlesbrough and also beneath beach deposits between Seaton Carew and Hartlepool. Here the beds are known as the Hartlepool Submerged Forest.

The peat and tree trunks date from a time shortly after the last great ice-sheets (glaciers) to occupy this part of N.W. Europe retreated northward as the climate warmed c.13,000 years before present (BP). When immense ice-sheets form, like those which occupied N. Britain during the last Ice-Age, prodigious amounts of water are sequestered as ice, a process which draws down global sea-level. When the climate recovers, the ice-sheets melt and sea-level gradually rises again.

By c.10,000 years BP, ice which once occupied Northern England had retreated, and the newly exposed post-glacial landscape was recolonised by vegetation. Sea-level was still some 150 metres, or so, lower than today and the place where Redcar now stands was part of a forested upland similar in altitude to nearby Upleatham Hill!

Continued wastage of the ice-sheets farther north gradually raised sea-level until between 8,000 and 6,000 years BP, it attained its modern position in the process overwhelming the ancient forest and producing the Peat and Forest Beds. The deposit was formerly much more extensive though most of the remains have been removed by modern erosion.

These are important deposits which can tell us a great deal about the changes in global temperature, sea-level fluctuation, and vegetative cover that have occurred in the Tees Valley over that last 8,000 years or so. As such they should not be disturbed – please visit them (when exposed) but leave them for the enjoyment and edification of others.