The Anglian glaciation
The greatest ice advance of the British Pleistocene reaches the outskirts of London.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 54 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 10 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
During MIS 12, around 478,000 to 424,000 years ago, ice sheets push further south across Britain and northern Europe than at any other time in the Quaternary, reaching Hornchurch in what is now east London and diverting the Thames permanently southward into its present valley. Known as the Anglian in Britain and the Elsterian on the continent, it also dams an enormous proglacial lake in the southern North Sea basin — with consequences that outlast the ice.