Humberside Geologist No.6

published 1988

The Centenary Chalk Project of the Hull Geological Society

By Mike Horne

In 1984 the Committee of the Hull Geological Society began to look ahead to the Society's Centenary in 1988. It was decided that it would be a good idea have a special project which would provide members with the chance to take part in active geological research if they wished and which would leave some sort of permanent achievement after the Centenary celebrations were over. After much discussion it was decided to study the Chalk of the Yorkshire Wolds under the guidance of Mr. F Whitham, who had held a long interest in the topic.

There were three good reasons or choosing the Chalk. Firstly, not a lot had been published on the Yorkshire Chalk. W.C.Ennis, Dr. Toyne and the Wright Brothers had published papers in our Transactions before the War; this work culminating in C.W. and E.V. Wright's 1942 paper "The Chalk of the Yorkshire Wolds". Since then Wood and Smith had published a lithostratigraphical division of the Northern Chalk which included East Yorkshire. Secondly, good collections of Chalk fossils seemed to be lacking, a lot of material was destroyed when the Hull Museum was bombed during the War. An attempt to re-establish the Museum collection and revise the Wrights' paper was made in the 1960s when Percy Gravett reprinted their paper. And lastly and most importantly many of the Chalk pits were being filled in rapidly. Few of the 131 pits listed the Wright Brothers still exist (since the project started two pits are being filled in and another is seriously threatened out of the ones we have measured). An inaugural meeting was held on 16th. May 1984, at which it was decided that the Project should aim to :

Fieldwork started in the summer of 1984 - visiting some of the exposures, like Enthorpe cutting, which Felix Whitham had previously measured and published, to get our 'eye' in and to start the collection. Since then the work has continued on an ad hoc basis, in addition to the Society's normal Summer Programme of field meetings; including a recent work party with picks and shovels to dig out the scree at the base of one quarry.

To date the quarries and pits that have been measured include :

and various coastal sections between Selwicks Bay and Sewerby.

The people who have helped with the project include Eric Chicken, the late Kenneth Fenton, Dave Finer, Tony Gear, Mike Horne, Richard Myerscough, Stephen Potts, Tom Scott, Roy Thackeray and Felix Whitham.

It was originally hoped that the composite lithostratigraphical column could be completed from inland exposures alone, bat this has proved not to be possible. It has been possible to cover the Cenomanian up to the top of the Coniacian (with a few minor gaps) working on inland exposures. Above this the coastal section has had to be included; where possible it has been correlated with isolated inland exposures. The highest (Campanian) beds have proved problematic as there is a gap between the highest inland beds and the coastal exposure at Sewerby.

But the work is still continuing and maybe some of these problems will have been solved by the time the work is published. Some of the results of the work have already been displayed in poster form, accompanied by some fossils from the collection, at the Yorkshire Geological Society's Hull meeting in March 1987 and at the Association of Teachers of Geology annual conference at Cottingham in September 1987.

The Society will be holding a Centenary Symposium in June 1988 and it is hoped that completed column will be ready for display at that meeting and that some of the fossils in the collection will be on display to the public in the Town Docks Museum in Hull.

References :

Wood, C.J. & Smith, E.G. 1978 Lithostratigraphical classification of the Chalk of North Yorkshire, Humberside and Lincolnshire. Proc. Yorkshire geol. Soc. 42, 263-287.

Wright,C.W. & Wright, E.V. 1942. The Chalk of the Yorkshire Wolds. Proc. Geol. Assoc. London 53, 112-127.

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