Selby Civic Society will have their next speaker meeting on Thursday 19th March 2026, starting at 7.30pm, which will be held at Portholme Church, Portholme Road, Selby. £2 for members, £5 for non-members, which includes light refreshments.
The speaker this month is Professor Mark Bateman, from the Geography Department of the University of Sheffield.
His talk will be about the situation in Yorkshire about 21,000 years ago with ice coming down off the Pennines, in from the North Sea and down the Vale of York. As the ice came down, rivers were blocked and vast amounts of meltwater produced, creating huge lakes. This talk will show some of the landscape and geological evidence for how far these ice lobes advanced, the extent of the lakes and the latest dating of when all this happened.
Hear how the Yorkshire landscape was formed, why some gardens are sandy and others are mainly clay and why the valleys in the Yorkshire Wolds are not river valleys!
Mark Bateman received a First Class BSc in Geography from the University of London in 1991 and a DPhil from Sussex University in 1995 for his research on dating UK coversands. In 1995 he joined the Sheffield Geography department. In 1998 he was appointed Lecturer in Physical Geography and in 2011 he became a Professor.
Mark Bateman’s research focusses on past sandscapes as an archive for better understanding past environmental changes. To date, he has over 200 publications in scientific journals, edited books and reports. He has spoken widely at International Scientific conferences, research seminars and has appeared on BBC Radio 4, local radio and even as a science contributor for an Amazon Prime drama.