(c) Lower Taylor Valley

VUWAE's 12 and 13 have designated glacial tills in this region, and they have attempted to identify a depositional sequence. Following a brief VUWAE 14 visit some anomalies have been explained.

(i)	Tills of the New Harbour Formation, 200+ metres thick, pass upwards to drop-pebble beds evidently deposited from floating ice. The tills are considered to have been deposited within a fiord when glacier ice occupied the Taylor Valley to a height of 300-400 metres above the valley floor.
(ii)	Subsequently, the ancestral Lake Fryxell formed behind the barrier of New Harbour Formation and a sequence of sheet tills was deposited, firstly lacustrine sediments, followed by coarse tills.
(iii)	The volcanic erratics assist in a limited evaluation of time control. The 2.7 million year old olivine basalts erupted in the middle Taylor Valley (Denton and Armstrong 1968) almost certainly comprise some of the erratics up to 600 m elevation above the valley floor down to the New Harbour and Fryxell Formations. Kenyte, not known to outcrop in the valley, is widely distributed in the Lower Valley and the erratics were deposited after 2.7 million years and after the last advance of Taylor Glacier. Volcanic erratics have been sampled both in the Wright and Taylor Valleys for petrologic study.page 27
(iv)	In view of the as yet little evaluated eustatic - isostatic marine control at New Harbour, events cannot be related to sea level control. However, the New Harbour Formation is clearly not a moraine and the sediments deposited from floating ice have subsequently been uplifted and tilted (approximately 5° SW). New Harbour sediments are involved in the isostatic rebound well recorded in the McMurdo Sound region, and they are apparently very old (from evidence of subsequent till weathering and the deposition of the younger Fryxell Formation).