Post-Glacial Flooding Hypothesis

Post-Glacial Flooding in Britain: FREE Full Flipbook + Evidence, Models & Maps

FREE online access to the full scientific foundation of the Post-Glacial Flooding Hypothesis

This page provides free access to the complete book
The Post-Glacial Flooding Hypothesis – The Evidence (v3.0),
The first volume in the Prehistoric Britain trilogy.

The book sets out a quantitative, testable model explaining why Britain remained hydrologically flooded for thousands of years after the end of the last Ice Age — long after global sea levels had stabilised.

The ice stopped melting first.
The oceans stopped rising next.
But the land kept draining for five millennia more.

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What This Book Examines

When the Last Glacial Maximum ended, Britain did not emerge into a dry, stable landscape. Instead, it inherited a hydrologically over-pressurised system shaped by three interacting forces:

Eustatic sea-level rise from global ice melt
Isostatic adjustment of a crust still rebounding from ice load
Hydrological memory — groundwater stored in saturated aquifers, released slowly over millennia

This book demonstrates that these processes kept Britain’s rivers, floodplains, and groundwater artificially elevated until roughly 3000 BCE, despite global sea levels stabilising by ~5600 BCE.

The result was a landscape of:

drowned valleys
enlarged rivers
long-lived marshes and peatlands
delayed terrestrial access to low-lying ground

The Core Evidence

The model presented here is not speculative. It is built from measurable physical archives found across Britain and north-west Europe.

1. River Terraces

Terrace staircases record sustained over-discharge rather than short flood events. Their spacing and elevation match predicted hydrological decay following ice loss.

2. Basal Peat Sequences

Buried peats at implausible modern elevations show centuries of standing water during the early and mid-Holocene — direct evidence of a raised water table.

3. Quantitative Hydrology

The book formalises a mathematical relationship linking:

ice-volume loss
relative sea-level position
river base level

This allows former water levels to be reconstructed and tested, not assumed.

4. Cross-Regional Correlation

Identical terrace and peat chronologies appear in:

Britain
the Rhine–Meuse basin
the Lower Elbe
North America

This confirms a North-Sea-scale hydrological system, not isolated regional anomalies.

Why This Matters

Archaeology has traditionally treated:

terraces
peat beds
drowned forests

as disconnected features.

This book shows they are time-coded components of a single hydrological system — one that governs:

when land became usable
where early settlement could exist
why early sites cluster on high ground
how prehistoric movement followed water, not dry land

Understanding post-glacial flooding is therefore foundational, not optional, for reconstructing Britain’s earliest landscapes.

Method and Scientific Scope

This volume is deliberately methodological.

It does not interpret monuments or artefacts.
Instead, it establishes the physical environment in which all later prehistoric activity occurred.

The approach integrates:

geomorphology
hydrology
sea-level science
radiocarbon and luminescence dating (with explicit limitations)

Hydrology is treated as a calibration tool, capable of verifying or challenging archaeological chronologies where sediment reworking or Bayesian compression distort dates.

Relationship to the Trilogy

This book is Volume I of the Prehistoric Britain trilogy.

Book I – Post-Glacial Flooded Britain
Establishes the physical laws governing the flooded landscape.
Book II – The Stonehenge Enigma
Applies the hydrological model to the chalk basin and Stonehenge’s earliest phase.
Book III – Dawn of the Lost Civilisation
Explores the human response to this water-dominated world: trade, navigation, and monument building.

Each volume builds logically on the one before it.

Who This Book Is For

Researchers questioning traditional Holocene models
Archaeologists working with riverine or lowland sites
Landscape historians and geomorphologists
Readers seeking evidence-led reconstruction, not myth or symbolism

Continue Exploring

You may also wish to read:

Post-Glacial Sea Levels in Britain
Avebury and Post-Glacial Flooding
The Stonehenge Enigma

All are FREE and available via the online bookcase.- https://fliphtml5.com/bookcase/ifitk/

Synopsis

Geologists have assumed that these glaciers melted due to warming in climatic conditions creating a series of ‘meltwater pulses’ over a short period of time, but they have failed to date to produce a realistic model that fits the total meltwater discharge which eventually created not only the North and Irish Seas but the hundreds of feet of sea-level rises that we are still experiencing today.

If you study any British Geological Society (BGS) map of Britain, you will notice it shows a series of bedrock, sedimentary and superficial deposits. Below these deposits, is a labyrinth of material that look like canals and gigantic waterways which lay under the surface on top of the bedrock, which is the remains of Palaeochannels from the last ice age. This evidence is a testament to how the landscape would have looked when the rivers were at their highest and when they were discharging at their maximum levels.

These superficial deposits that resemble ancient rivers can be seen on the surface and are known to archaeologists, geologists and the general public as ‘Dry River Valleys’ – because the river valleys today are currently dry. These great waterways can be readily seen in profile in the cliffs and valleys of the South Downs, where they show their curved river nature by the remains of the superficial subsoil consisting of sand, silt and clay.

Past geologists have failed to identify these huge concave broken chalk sections of the cliffs accurately, or to date the river terraces deposited from the remains of the meltwater of the last glaciation maximum (LGM), as they have historically only identified the gravels and bedrock within geological periods. Their arguments are compounded as they fail to explain why they are relatively short distances from the sandy silt to today’s topsoil or why silt and sand are at elevations above supposed earlier river terracing, so they suggest these deposits are ‘windblown Loess’ – blown into position rather than deposits laid down by rivers of the past.

This book uses existing scientific evidence from peer-reviewed publications and modern mathematical models to give you an understanding of how the landscape looked in the Holocene period, giving archaeologists the tools to reveal fresh discoveries and a better understanding of our history.The Post Glacial Flooding Hypothesis

Content

Preface

Introduction

The Last Ice Age

Hydrology
Groundwater and Aquifers
The Maths

Sea-Level Changes
Rivers and Streams
The Eurasia Ice Cap

Precipitation

Landscape Transformation

North American Post-Glacial Flooding
Case Study – Mississippi River

Black Sea Post-Glacial Flooding

Germany’s Post-Glacial Flooding

Britain’s Post-Glacial Flooding
Case Study – The Thames

Peat – Further Evidence of Holocene Flooding
Case Study – Upper Dee
Case Study – Somerset Plain
Porlock Bay
Minehead Bay
Parrott Valley
Shapwick
Glastonbury
Somerset Levels and Moors
River Siger

Holocene Rivers in Britain
Case Study – Welsh River Catchment
Caersws
Roundabout
Ystrad Caron
Pant

Discussion
Case Study – River Avon

Conclusion

Appendixes

Author’s Biography

Illustrations

Figure 1 – Cliffs of the Southdown – superficial deposits

Figure 2 – Close inspection of Paleochannels

Figure 3 – 1947 Flooding of British Rivers

Figure 4 – How Aquifers work

Figure 5 – Location of aquifers

Figure 6 – Generalised sea level rise since the last ice age

Figure 7 – Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

Figure 8 – Meltwater pulses

Figure 9 – Rivers and streams flowing on top of the ice sheet

Figure 10 – Wadden Sea with 51 basal-peat dates

Figure 11 – Wadden Sea reconstruction of the sea-level curve

Figure 12 – Wadden Sea Holocene Sea-Level

Figure 13 – Rainfall over the last 10k years

Figure 14 – North Sea Discharge levels in the early Holocene

Figure 15 – Total discharge from each North American river basin

Figure 16 – North American Holocene River discharge network

Figure 17 – Mississippi River Discharge

Figure 18 – Increased discharge rate in North American Holocene

Figure 19 – Black Sea Basin

Figure 20 – Ponto-Caspian Great Flood basins

Figure 21 – The Iron Gates, Germany

Figure 22 – 506 14C dates from German rivers and hillslopes

Figure 23 – Flood segment units

Figure 24 – Alluvial Dating Units

Figure 25 – 147 Recorded Flood frequencies in Britain

Figure 26 – Lidar data mapping of a typical river system over time

Figure 27 – Traditional View of the Thames River terraces

Figure 28 – BGS Map of London in the Holocene Period

Figure 29(a)(b) Thames River Cross-Sections A – G

Figure 30 – Sea-levels over the last 500k years

Figure 31 – River terrace deposits by ‘speculative’ age

Figure 32 – Obsolete terms

Figure 33 – BGS map of ‘superficial’ deposits boreholes

Figure 34 – Cross-Section H

Figure 35 – How London probably looked about 10,000 BCE

Figure 36 – Hornchurch marshes investigation

Figure 37 – Peat reflects the flooded Holocene environment

Figure 38 – Peats peaked some 4000 years after the LGM

Figure 39 – Location of the Upper Dee area

Figure 40 – Peat growth Rates over the last 10K years

Figure 41 – Somerset Flats Maps

Figure 42 – Shapwick boreholes

Figure 43 – Lidar map of the Somerset flats

Figure 44 – River Siger

Figure 45 – Flood episodes over the last 12,000 years since LGM

Figure 46 – Change in elevation between successive river terraces

Figure 47 – Model of Holocene River Entrenchments

Figure 48 – Holocene Flood episodes and frequency

Figure 49 – Location of the sites investigated

Figure 50 – Caersws site, upper River Severn

Figure 51 – Caersws Past and Present illustration

Figure 52 – How ‘Roundabout’ in the Holocene period

Figure 53 – Sedimentological data from the Roundabout site

Figure 54 – Ystrad Caron site as seen in the Holocene Period

Figure 55 – Sedimentological data from the Ystrad Caron site

Figure 56 – The Pant site during the Holocene Period

Figure 57 – Sedimentological data from the Pant site

Figure 58 – Holocene palaeoflood histories

Figure 59 – Map of river terraces and distribution of field sites

Figure 60 – OSL age estimates from Solent Terraces

Figure 61 – Schematic valley cross-section for Avon Valley

Figure 62 – Bemerton showing four OSL samples

Tables

Table 1 – Size of the last Ice Age

Table 2 – Dates of Ice Pulses

Table 3 – Wadden Sea statistics

Table 4 – North American River Discharge Rates

Table 5. – Increased discharge levels during the Holocene

Table 6 – Comparison of LGM v PGM by sea-level difference

Table 7 – Peat C14 dating samples for Somerset

Table 8 – Dates of River Flooding

Table 9 – Holocene Flood Events

Table 10. – Dated Samples from Welsh Catchment Area