Ysgletservloer

Just a short distance past the Hantam Botanical gardens outside Nieuwoudtville you will find the traces of ice glaciers.The glacial grooves were caused by ice about 300 million years ago when southern Africa moved over the South Pole as part of the Gondwana supercontinent. Debris transported by the glacier built up the cobblestone-clay mixture (tillite, diamictite) of the Dwyka formation. Fragments in the ice made scratch marks on the smooth sanded sandstone floor of the Table Mountain Group, as well as plowed deeper furrows into the thin layer of loose sand, which had accumulated under the glacier. Linear rough and oval shaped humps were created by plastic sand being pressed into the cavities under the ice. At Oorlogskloof, the flow of the glacier through the paleoslope or an ice lobe was directed from the east to west-northwest, but the general movement of the much larger ice sheet across the Bushmanland was southward and westward.