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Journal of the Geological Society

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Palaeoclimates

Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, Deacon Laboratory, Brook Road, Wormley, Godalming, Surrey GU8 5UB, UK

Research into palaeoclimate was reviewed at the third Lyell Meeting of the Geological Society on 23 February 1989. These meetings in honour of one of the founding fathers of Geology were recently inaugurated by the Palaeontological Association and the Geological Society and the title of this meeting, Palaeoclimates, was an apt celebration of Charles Lyell's considerable interests in the subject.

Of the 13 papers and one poster presented at the meeting, eight papers have been collected for publication in this thematic set in the Journal of the Geological Society.

Charles Lyell and palaeoclimate

Ever since the days of Charles Lyell it has been appreciated that climate is one of the first order controls on stratigraphy. Lyell himself devoted no less than four chapters of the 12th edition of his Principles of Geology (Lyell 1875) to the subject. Given the tectonic processes that put continent where they are and create topography, climate then governs the kinds of weathering, development of soil, rates of erosion, means of transport, conditions in the environment of deposition, and much of the development of the stratigraphic record. The tectonic framework creates the space for sediments to accumulate in basins, and itself modifies the climatic regime.

Without the benefit of global knowledge and of plate tectonic theory Lyell fully realized that the continents had probably moved through time and that these motions in themselves modified climate, as the following quotations make plain.

The deviations of (isothermal) lines from the same parallel of latitude are determined by a