UPPER PLEISTOCENE LOW-LATITUDE GLACIAL LANDSCAPE AND SEDIMENTS OF PIAS, NW SPAIN

 M. VALCÁRCEL DÍAZ¹, A. PÉREZ-ALBERTI¹ and I.P.MARTINI²

¹Departamento de Xeografía,  Santiago de Compostela, Spain
²Department of Land Resource Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada

A debate exists on the extension and activity of glaciers that may have developed during the Last Glacial Maximum in Europe at relatively southern latitudes and low altitudes. In northwestern Spain (Galicia) valley glaciers existed at about latitudes 42^oN at elevations lower than 1000 m asl, fed by altiplano ice caps. These valley glaciers often interacted at the junction of their valleys, for example damming some valleys and generating temporary glacial lakes that may have emptied suddenly and catastrophically. Exposures in a large, active sand and gavel pit at Pias contain evidence of moraines, floods events, deltas of the temporary lakes, lake deposition and deformation structures some related to ice push and others to frozen ground effects.

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