Irish Quaternary Association

Quaternary studies identify with the Quaternary time frame in the topographical time scale. This is the briefest and latest land period covering the last 2 million years of the Earth's history, straight up to the present day. The Quaternary and Tertiary periods together shape the Cenezoic time. The Quaternary is for the most part broken into two ages, the Pleistocene (from around 2 million years prior to ten thousand years back) and the Holocene (from 10,000 BP to the present day).The Quaternary period has been set apart by rehashed glaciations on vast tracts of the Northern Hemisphere which are today ice free. In this way it incorporates what is famously named the Ice Age. Ireland was secured by thick icy ice on no less than two separate events amid the Quaternary.

The Royal Irish Academy (RIA) Committee for Quaternary Research in Ireland was set up in 1934, giving a key boost to the investigation of Ireland's Quaternary history. The Irish Quaternary Association in the 1970s, (IQUA) was established with a perspective to co-ordinating and invigorating all parts of Quaternary exploration in Ireland and going on existing skill through meetings and particularly field journeys. Outstanding patrons at the time included Frank Mitchell, Francis Synge, Alan Smith, Marshall McCabe, Bill Watts, and Willie Warren. The INQUA Congress held in Birmingham in 1977, which included trips to Ireland drove by Watts and Synge, gave a further catalyst to Quaternary studies in Ireland. The connection between the RIA and INQUA keeps on being decidedly encouraged by dynamic Quaternary researchers spoke to by means of the RIA's Geoscience Committee (once in the past the National Committee for Geology), and by financing IQUA's national agents to go to INQUA congresses. Besides, the beneficiary of IQUA's inaugural Frank Mitchell Award for Distinguished Service to Teaching and Quaternary Research , Pete Coxon, has served as both IQUA President (2008-2012) and as Secretary-General of INQUA (2003-2011), along these lines reinforcing the connection amongst IQUA and INQUA.