The Elements of Geology Part 9

In what respects is a valley glacier like a mountain stream which flows out upon desert plains?

Two confluent glaciers do not mingle their currents as do two confluent rivers. What characteristics of surface moraines prove this fact?

What effect would you expect the laws of glacier motion to have on the slant of the sides of transverse creva.s.ses?

A trunk glacier has four medial moraines. Of how many tributaries is it composed? Ill.u.s.trate by diagram.

State all the evidences which you have found that glaciers move.

If a glacier melts back with occasional pauses up a valley, what records are left of its retreat?

PIEDMONT GLACIERS

THE MALASPINA GLACIER. Piedmont (foot of the mountain) glaciers are, as the name implies, ice fields formed at the foot of mountains by the confluence of valley glaciers. The Malaspina glacier of Alaska, the typical glacier of this kind, is seventy miles wide and stretches for thirty miles from the foot of the Mount Saint Elias range to the sh.o.r.e of the Pacific Ocean. The valley glaciers which unite and spread to form this lake of ice lie above the snow line and their moraines are concealed beneath neve. The central area of the Malaspina is also free from debris; but on the outer edge large quant.i.ties of englacial drift are exposed by surface melting and form a belt of morainic waste a few feet thick and several miles wide, covered in part with a luxuriant forest, beneath which the ice is in places one thousand feet in depth. The glacier here is practically stagnant, and lakes a few hundred yards across, which could not exist were the ice in motion and broken with creva.s.ses, gather on their beds sorted waste from the moraine. The streams which drain the glacier have cut their courses in englacial and subglacial tunnels; none flow for any distance on the surface. The largest, the Yahtse River, issues from a high archway in the ice,--a muddy torrent one hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep, loaded with sand and stones which it deposits in a broad outwash plain (Fig. 110).

Where the ice has retreated from the sea there is left a hummocky drift sheet with hollows filled with lakelets. These deposits help to explain similar hummocky regions of drift and similar plains of coa.r.s.e, water-laid material often found in the drift-covered area of the northeastern United States.

THE GEOLOGICAL WORK OF GLACIER ICE

The sluggish glacier must do its work in a different way from the agile river. The mountain stream is swift and small, and its channel occupies but a small portion of the valley. The glacier is slow and big; its rate of motion may be less than a millionth of that of running water over the same declivity, and its bulk is proportionately large and fills the valley to great depth.

Moreover, glacier ice is a solid body plastic under slowly applied stresses, while the water of rivers is a nimble fluid.

TRANSPORTATION. Valley glaciers differ from rivers as carriers in that they float the major part of their load upon their surface, transporting the heaviest bowlder as easily as a grain of sand; while streams push and roll much of their load along their beds, and their power of transporting waste depends solely upon their velocity. The amount of the surface load of glaciers is limited only by the amount of waste received from the mountain slopes above them. The moving floor of ice stretched high across a valley sweeps along as lateral moraines much of the waste which a mountain stream would let acc.u.mulate in talus and alluvial cones.

While a valley glacier carries much of its load on top, an ice sheet, such as that of Greenland, is free from surface debris, except where moraines trail away from some nunatak. If at its edge it breaks into separate glaciers which drain down mountain valleys, these tongues of ice will carry the selvages of waste common to valley glaciers. Both ice sheets and valley glaciers drag on large quant.i.ties of rock waste in their ground moraines.

Stones transported by glaciers are sometimes called erratics. Such are the bowlders of the drift of our northern states. Erratics may be set down in an insecure position on the melting of the ice.

DEPOSIT. Little need be added here to what has already been said of ground and terminal moraines. All strictly glacial deposits are unstratified. The load laid down at the end of a glacier in the terminal moraine is loose in texture, while the drift lodged beneath the glacier as ground moraine is often an extremely dense, stony clay, having been compacted under the pressure of the overriding ice.

EROSION. A glacier erodes its bed and banks in two ways,--by abrasion and by plucking.

The rock bed over which a glacier has moved is seen in places to have been abraded, or ground away, to smooth surfaces which are marked by long, straight, parallel scorings aligned with the line of movement of the ice and varying in size from hair lines and coa.r.s.e scratches to exceptional furrows several feet deep. Clearly this work has been accomplished by means of the sharp sand, the pebbles, and the larger stones with which the base of the glacier is inset, and which it holds in a firm grasp as running water cannot. Hard and fine-grained rocks, such as granite and quartzite, are often not only ground down to a smooth surface but are also highly polished by means of fine rock flour worn from the glacier bed.

In other places the bed of the glacier is rough and torn. The rocks have been disrupted and their fragments have been carried away,--a process known as PLUCKING. Moving under immense pressure the ice shatters the rock, breaks off projections, presses into crevices and wedges the rocks apart, dislodges the blocks into which the rock is divided by joints and bedding planes, and freezing fast to the fragments drags them on. In this work the freezing and thawing of subglacial waters in any cracks and crevices of the rock no doubt play an important part. Plucking occurs especially where the bed rock is weak because of close jointing. The product of plucking is bowlders, while the product of abrasion is fine rock flour and sand.

Is the ground moraine of Figure 87 due chiefly to abrasion or to plucking?

ROCHES MOUTONNEES AND ROUNDED HILLS. The prominences left between the hollows due to plucking are commonly ground down and rounded on the stoss side,--the side from which the ice advances,--and sometimes on the opposite, the lee side, as well. In this way the bed rock often comes to have a billowy surface known as roches moutonnees (sheep rocks). Hills overridden by an ice sheet often have similarly rounded contours on the stoss side, while on the lee side they may be craggy, either because of plucking or because here they have been less worn from their initial profile.

THE DIRECTION OF GLACIER MOVEMENT. The direction of the flow of vanished glaciers and ice sheets is recorded both in the differences just mentioned in the profiles of overridden hills and also in the minute details of the glacier trail.

Flint nodules or other small prominences in the bed rock are found more worn on the stoss than on the lee side, where indeed they may have a low cone of rock protected by them from abrasion. Cavities, on the other hand, have their edges worn on the lee side and left sharp upon the stoss.

Surfaces worn and torn in the ways which we have mentioned are said to be glaciated. But it must not be supposed that a glacier everywhere glaciates its bed. Although in places it acts as a rasp or as a pick, in others, and especially where its pressure is least, as near the terminus, it moves over its bed in the manner of a sled. Instances are known where glaciers have advanced over deposits of sand and gravel without disturbing them to any notable degree. Like a river, a glacier does not everywhere erode. In places it leaves its bed undisturbed and in places aggrades it by deposits of the ground moraine.

CIRQUES. Valley glaciers commonly head as we have seen, in broad amphitheaters deeply filled with snow and ice. On mountains now dest.i.tute of glaciers, but whose glaciation shows that they have supported glaciers in the past, there are found similar crescentic hollows with high, precipitous walls and glaciated floors. Their floors are often basined and hold lakelets whose deep and quiet waters reflect the sheltering ramparts of rugged rock which tower far above them. Such mountain hollows are termed CIRQUES. As a powerful spring wears back a recess in the valley side where it discharges, so the fountain head of a glacier gradually wears back a cirque. In its slow movement the neve field broadly scours its bed to a flat or basined floor. Meanwhile the sides of the valley head are steepened and driven back to precipitous walls. For in winter the creva.s.se of the bergschrund which surrounds the neve field is filled with snow and the neve is frozen fast to the rocky sides of the valley. In early summer the neve tears itself free, dislodging and removing any loosened blocks, and the open fissure of the bergschrund allows frost and other agencies of weathering to attack the unprotected rock. As cirques are thus formed and enlarged the peaks beneath which they lie are sharpened, and the mountain crests are scalloped and cut back from either side to knife-edged ridges.

In the western mountains of the United States many cirques, now empty of neve and glacier ice, and known locally as "basins,"

testify to the fact that in recent times the snow line stood beneath the levels of their floors, and thus far below its present alt.i.tude.

GLACIER TROUGHS. The channel worn to accommodate the big and clumsy glacier differs markedly from the river valley cut as with a saw by the narrow and flexible stream and widened by the weather and the wash of rains. The valley glacier may easily be from one thousand to three thousand feet deep and from one to three miles wide. Such a ponderous bulk of slowly moving ice does not readily adapt itself to sharp turns and a narrow bed. By scouring and plucking all resisting edges it develops a fitting channel with a wide, flat floor, and steep, smooth sides, above which are seen the weathered slopes of stream-worn mountain valleys. Since the trunk glacier requires a deeper channel than do its branches, the bed of a branch glacier enters the main trough at some distance above the floor of the latter, although the surface of the two ice streams may be accordant. Glacier troughs can be studied best where large glaciers have recently melted completely away, as is the case in many valleys of the mountains of the western United States and of central and northern Europe (Fig. 114). The typical glacier trough, as shown in such examples, is U-shaped, with a broad, flat floor, and high, steep walls. Its walls are little broken by projecting spurs and lateral ravines. It is as if a V- valley cut by a river had afterwards been gouged deeper with a gigantic chisel, widening the floor to the width of the chisel blade, cutting back the spurs, and smoothing and steepening the sides. A river valley could only be as wide-floored as this after it had long been worn down to grade.

The floor of a glacier trough may not be graded; it is often interrupted by irregular steps perhaps hundreds and even a thousand feet in height, over which the stream that now drains the valley tumbles in waterfalls. Reaches between the steps are often basined. Lakelets may occupy hollows excavated in solid rock, and other lakes may be held behind terminal moraines left as dams across the valley at pauses in the retreat of the glacier.

FJORDS are glacier troughs now occupied in part or wholly by the sea, either because they were excavated by a tide glacier to their present depth below sea level, or because of a submergence of the land. Their characteristic form is that of a long, deep, narrow bay with steep rock walls and basined floor. Fjords are found only in regions which have suffered glaciation, such as Norway and Alaska.

HANGING VALLEYS. These are lateral valleys which open on their main valley some distance above its floor. They are conspicuous features of glacier troughs from which the ice has vanished; for the trunk glacier in widening and deepening its channel cut its bed below the bottoms of the lateral valleys.

Since the mouths of hanging valleys are suspended on the walls of the glacier trough, their streams are compelled to plunge down its steep, high sides in waterfalls. Some of the loftiest and most beautiful waterfalls of the world leap from hanging valleys,-- among them the celebrated Staubbach of the Lauterbrunnen valley of Switzerland, and those of the fjords of Norway and Alaska.

Hanging valleys are found also in river gorges where the smaller tributaries have not been able to keep pace with a strong master stream in cutting down their beds. In this case, however, they are a mark of extreme youth; for, as the trunk stream approaches grade and its velocity and power to erode its bed decrease, the side streams soon cut back their falls and wear their beds at their mouths to a common level with that of the main river. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado must be reckoned a young valley. At its base it narrows to scarcely more than the width of the river, and yet its tributaries, except the very smallest, enter it at a common level.

Why could not a wide-floored valley, such as a glacier trough, with hanging valleys opening upon it, be produced in the normal development of a river valley?

THE TROUGHS OF YOUNG AND OF MATURE GLACIERS. The features of a glacier trough depend much on the length of time the preexisting valley was occupied with ice. During the infancy of a glacier, we may believe, the spurs of the valley which it fills are but little blunted and its bed is but little broken by steps. In youth the glacier develops icefalls, as a river in youth develops waterfalls, and its bed becomes terraced with great stairs. The mature glacier, like the mature river, has effaced its falls and smoothed its bed to grade. It has also worn back the projecting spurs of its valley, making itself a wide channel with smooth sides. The bed of a mature glacier may form a long basin, since it abrades most in its upper and middle course, where its weight and motion are the greatest. Near the terminus, where weight and motion are the least, it erodes least, and may instead deposit a sheet of ground moraine, much as a river builds a flood plain in the same part of its course as it approaches maturity. The bed of a mature glacier thus tends to take the form of a long, relatively narrow basin, across whose lower end may be stretched the dam of the terminal moraine. On the disappearance of the ice the basin is rilled with a long, narrow lake, such as Lake Chelan in Was.h.i.+ngton and many of the lakes in the Highlands of Scotland.

Piedmont glaciers apparently erode but little. Beneath their lake- like expanse of sluggish or stagnant ice a broad sheet of ground moraine is probably being deposited.

Cirques and glaciated valleys rapidly lose their characteristic forms after the ice has withdrawn. The weather destroys all smoothed, polished, and scored surfaces which are not protected beneath glacial deposits. The oversteepened sides of the trough are graded by landslips, by talus slopes, and by alluvial cones.

Morainic heaps of drift are dissected and carried away. Hanging valleys and the irregular bed of the trough are both worn down to grade by the streams which now occupy them. The length of time since the retreat of the ice from a mountain valley may thus be estimated by the degree to which the destruction of the characteristic features of the glacier trough has been carried.

In Figure 104 what characteristics of a glacier trough do you notice? What inference do you draw as to the former thickness of the glacier?

Name all the evidences you would expect to find to prove the fact that in the recent geological past the valleys of the Alps contained far larger glaciers than at present, and that on the north of the Alps the ice streams united in a piedmont glacier which extended across the plains of Switzerland to the sides of the Jura Mountains.

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF GLACIERS AND OF RIVERS. Powerful as glaciers are, and marked as are the land forms which they produce, it is easy to exaggerate their geological importance as compared with rivers. Under present climatic conditions they are confined to lofty mountains or polar lands. Polar ice sheets are permanent only so long as the lands remain on which they rest. Mountain glaciers can stay only the brief time during which the ranges continue young and high. As lofty mountains, such as the Selkirks and the Alps, are lowered by frost and glacier ice, the snowfall will decrease, the line of permanent snow will rise, and as the mountain hollows in which snow may gather are worn beneath the snow line, the glaciers must disappear. Under present climatic conditions the work of glaciers is therefore both local and of short duration.

Even the glacial epoch, during which vast ice sheets deposited drift over northeastern North America, must have been brief as well as recent, for many lofty mountains, such as the Rockies and the Alps, still bear the marks of great glaciers which then filled their valleys. Had the glacial epoch been long, as the earth counts time, these mountains would have been worn low by ice; had the epoch been remote, the marks of glaciation would already have been largely destroyed by other agencies.

On the other hand, rivers are well-nigh universally at work over the land surfaces of the globe, and ever since the dry land appeared they have been constantly engaged in leveling the continents and in delivering to the seas the waste which there is built into the stratified rocks.

ICEBERGS. Tide glaciers, such as those of Greenland and Alaska, are able to excavate their beds to a considerable distance below sea level. From their fronts the buoyancy of sea water raises and breaks away great ma.s.ses of ice which float out to sea as icebergs. Only about one seventh of a ma.s.s of glacier ice floats above the surface, and a berg three hundred feet high may be estimated to have been detached from a glacier not less than two thousand feet thick where it met the sea.

Icebergs transport on their long journeys whatever drift they may have carried when part of the glacier, and scatter it, as they melt, over the ocean floor. In this way pebbles torn by the inland ice from the rocks of the interior of Greenland and glaciated during their carriage in the ground moraine are dropped at last among the oozes of the bottom of the North Atlantic.

CHAPTER VI

THE WORK OF THE WIND

We are now to study the geological work of the currents of the atmosphere, and to learn how they erode, and transport and deposit waste as they sweep over the land. Ill.u.s.trations of the wind's work are at hand in dry weather on any windy day.

Clouds of dust are raised from the street and driven along by the gale. Here the roadway is swept bare; and there, in sheltered places, the dust settles in little windrows. The erosive power of waste-laden currents of air is suggested as the sharp grains of flying sand sting one's face or clatter against the window. In the country one sometimes sees the dust whirled in clouds from dry, plowed fields in spring and left in the lee of fences in small drifts resembling in form those of snow in winter.

THE ESSENTIAL CONDITIONS for the wind's conspicuous work are ill.u.s.trated in these simple examples; they are aridity and the absence of vegetation. In humid climates these conditions are only rarely and locally met; for the most part a thick growth of vegetation protects the moist soil from the wind with a cover of leaves and stems and a mattress of interlacing roots. But in arid regions either vegetation is wholly lacking, or scant growths are found huddled in detached clumps, leaving inters.p.a.ces of unprotected ground (Fig. 119). Here, too, the mantle of waste, which is formed chiefly under the action of temperature changes, remains dry and loose for long periods. Little or no moisture is present to cause its particles to cohere, and they are therefore readily lifted and drifted by the wind.