Ghosts of the ice age are being resurrected in Norfolk. When the ice sheets retreated at the end of the last ice age, mounds of ice called pingos remained underground until they thawed and the soil slumped, leaving behind shallow hollows that filled with water.
These turned into swampy wetland habitats rich in plants and wildlife and Breckland, in Norfolk, became pocked with hundreds of these pingo pools, although many of them were later filled in for farmland and became lost.
Some of the ancient pingos are being rediscovered using advanced mapping techniques and are then carefully excavated, turning them back into pools filling naturally with groundwater. Despite being buried under fields for so long, these ancient pools can resurrect themselves from historical seeds buried in the sediments of the old “ghost ponds”.
Seeds of old aquatic plants can still germinate, some of them rare plants such as fen pondweed, various-leaved pondweed and lesser bearded stonewort. The plants then rapidly recolonise the ponds and the revitalised pingos attract wildlife, including 50 species of water beetles, as well as amphibians and reptiles, including common frogs, toads and great crested newts.
