EARTH SURFACE PROCESSES AND LANDFORMS, VOL. 17,845-847 (1992)

BOOK REVIEWS

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN ICELAND: PAST AND PRESENT edited by J. K. Maizels and C. Caseldine, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1991. No. of pages: xi + 332. Price: DFI 175.00, E61.00. ISBN 0-792- 312-90.

The papers in this volume were originally presented at a meeting held in Aberdeen in April 1989 under the aegis of the Quaternary Research Association and the Geologists’ Association. They provide a reasonably comprehensive review of the state of knowledge of the Lateglacial and Holocene palaeoenvironments of a fas- cinating island located strategically in a mid-ocean posi- tion where conditions are likely to be strongly affected by migrations of the oceanic Polar Front, and where vol- canic activity and the effects of faunal and floral in- migration may also have been significant influences. The book is split into three sections, concerned with (i) Late- glacial and early Holocene environmental changes; (ii) environmental changes during the Postglacial (subdivi- ded into sections dealing with biotic changes, climatic change and human settlement, and with glacier fluctuations); and (iii) recent landscape change. Regret- ably, the number of papers which make significant con- tributions to the resolution of the principal unresolved questions concerning this period in Iceland is relatively small, and the volume serves more as a monument to what remains to be done than as a source of new insights.

Of particular note in the first section is Ingolfsson’s review of the Late Weichselian and early Holocene gla- cial and environmental history of Iceland. This provides persuasive evidence (supported by other papers in the section) that the conventional wisdom concerning the extent of past glaciation and patterns of deglaciation is in need of major revision. There is a pressing need for detailed regional studies of glacial history, which could take advantage of the firm chronological framework likely to be provided by the developing tephrochrono- logy. This paper also draws attention to the lack of knowledge of the island’s relative sea level history (which may be of particular interest given the unusually low viscosity of the crust in Iceland (paper by Thors and Helgadottir) and vegetation history. Given the intrinsic biogeographic interest of the problem of woodland estab- lishment and development on a large mid-oceanic island, it is remarkable that this has hitherto received virtually no study, when compared to the amount of attention that has been paid to the origins of the insect fauna (paper by Buckland and Dugmore, shame about the title-‘If this is a Refugium, why are my feet so bloody cold? The origins of the Icelandic biota in the light of recent

research‘). There is clearly much scope for multidisciplin- ary studies of the Holocene development of the entire biota. These should allow further testing of hypotheses concerning the possible existence of glacial refugia, and detailed reconstruction of patterns of colonization by different fossil groups and individual taxa.

In the second section, the detailed work by Dugmore and Buckland on the spatial and temporal patterns of soil erosion which occurred following human settlement in southern Iceland stands out as a fine example of the sort of problem which can be tackled given the fine chronostratigraphic resolution provided by the abund- ant ash layers found in p a t s and soil profiles across much of the island. The papers on glacier fluctuations all relate to work being carried out in the marginally glacier- ized areas of northern Iceland (work by Stotter, Haberle, Kugelman and Caseldine). It is encouraging to see that these studies are beginning to suggest a longer and more complex record of Neoglacial glacier fluctuations than was hitherto believed to exist in Iceland, but nonetheless surprising that the challenge of understanding the history of the major ice caps has yet to be confronted.

Without doubt the outstanding paper in the volume is that by Maizels on the origin and evolution of Holocene sandur deposits in areas of jokulhaup drainage. Maizels uses meticulous studies of the stratigraphy and sedimen- tology of six different sandur systems to produce three distinct models of sandur evolution. The first model characterizes those sandurs on which the hydrological regime is dominated by the seasonal meltwater flood; the second is appropriate to systems affected by prolonged high magnitude drainage events associated with the re- lease of ice-dammed lakes or subglacial geothermal activ- ity; the third relates to those areas affected by cata- strophic flood events associated with subglacial volcanic eruptions. The second and third models seem to be most appropriate for understanding the formation of the san- durs of southern Iceland. Maizels’ work demonstrates effectively that there is considerable potential for in- ferring past hydrological regimes from the character of glaciofluvial sediments. This finding will be of con- siderable interest to those evaluating the possible role of high magnitude flood eyents in geomorphic evolution during the deglaciation of the mid-latitude ice sheets.

For Quaternarists in search of ideas for research pro- jects, this volume should suggest enough to keep one going for a lifetime!

MARTIN SHARP University of Cambridge

0 1992 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.