The Glacial (Permo-Carboniferous) Moraines 

 of Rosetta Head and King's point, South 

 australia. 



By Walter Howchin, F.G.S., Lecturer in Geology and 

 Palaeontology in the University of Adelaide. 



[Read April 5, 1910.] 



Plates I. to XVII. 



The coastline from the mouth of the River Murray to 

 King's Point, a distance of little more than twenty miles, is 

 one of the most varied and interesting portions of the southern 

 sea-board of South Australia. The low foreshore of Middle- 

 ton ; the prominent headlands of Port Elliot, Rosetta Head, 

 and King's Point ; the picturesque islands that festoon the 

 coast ; and the serrated schists that occupy the beach between 

 Rosetta Head and King's Point make this section of the 

 coast rich in contrasts and of great scenic beauty. 



This locality is, moreover, a centre of interest, more pro- 

 found and far-reaching than the merely picturesque. Here 

 are the remnants of an extensive but vanished highland 

 which in the far past had its snow-covered peaks and out- 

 spreading rivers of ice — ice that spread in one continuous 

 sheet from the valley of the Murray to Spencer Gulf, chok- 

 ing the valleys and overstepping the secondary water- 

 sheds in its flow towards the northern plains. The morainic 

 material carried by this ice-sheet was enormous, and notwith- 

 standing that much of it has been removed by subsequent 

 denudation, enough has been left in sheltered situations to 

 give us some idea of the magnitude of the ice-flood. 



My present purpose is to deal with only a very small por- 

 tion of this great extinct glacial field, viz., a description of 

 the moraines which found a shelter on the leeward side of what 

 are now two headlands facing the Southern Ocean. 



I do not wish by the title of this paper to convey the 

 impression that Rosetta Head and King's Point were respon- 

 sible for the origin of separate and exclusive glacial deposits. 

 The moraines which stretch northward from the Bluff and 

 King's Point were certainly influenced by local contours, but 

 at the same time they formed part of the one great glacial 

 mud-deluge which in Permo-Carboniferous times flowed over^ 

 the. whole of what is now the southern districts of South 

 Australia. The excuse for dealing with this subject in a sec- 



