The Elements of Geology - William Harmon Norton (best beach reads TXT) 📗

THE ROCK SURFACE UNDERLYING THE DRIFT. Over much of its area the drift rests on firm, fresh rock, showing that both the preglacial mantle of residual waste and the partially decomposed and broken rock beneath it have been swept away. The underlying rock, especially if massive, hard, and of a fine grain, has often been ground down to a smooth surface and rubbed to a polish as perfect as that seen on the rock beside an Alpine glacier where the ice has recently melted back. Frequently it has been worn to the smooth, rounded hummocks known as roches moutonnees, and even rocky hills have been thus smoothed to flowing outlines like roches moutonnees on a gigantic scale. The rock pavement beneath the drift is also marked by long, straight, parallel scorings, varying in size from deep grooves to fine striae as delicate as the hair lines cut by an engraver's needle. Where the rock is soft or closely jointed it is often shattered to a depth of several feet beneath the drift, while stony clay has been thrust in among the fragments into which the rock is broken.

In the presence of these glaciated surfaces we cannot doubt that the area of the drift has been overridden by vast sheets of ice which, in their steady flow, rasped and scored the rock bed beneath by means of the stones with which their basal layers were inset, and in places plucked and shattered it.

TILL. The unstratified portion of the drift consists chiefly of sheets of dense, stony clay called till, which clearly are the ground moraines of ancient continental glaciers. Till is an unsorted mixture of materials of all sizes, from fine clay and sand, gravel, pebbles, and cobblestones, to large bowlders. The stones of the till are of many kinds, some having been plucked from the bed rock of the locality where they are found, and others having been brought from outside and often distant places. Land ice is the only agent known which can spread unstratified material in such extensive sheets.

The FINE MATERIAL of the till comes from two different sources. In part it is derived from old residual clays, which in the making had been leached of the lime and other soluble ingredients of the rock from which they weathered. In part it consists of sound rock ground fine; a drop of acid on fresh, clayey till often proves by brisk effervescence that the till contains much undecayed limestone flour. The ice sheet, therefore, both scraped up the mantle of long-weathered waste which covered the coun try before its coming, and also ground heavily upon the sound rock underneath, and crushed and wore to rock flour the fragments which it carried.

The color of unweathered till depends on that of the materials of which it is composed. Where red sandstones have contributed largely to its making, as over the Triassic sandstones of the eastern states and the Algonkian sandstones about Lake Superior, the drift is reddish. When derived in part from coaly shales, as over many outcrops of the Pennsylvanian, it may when moist be almost black. Fresh till is normally a dull gray or bluish, so largely is it made up of the grindings of unoxidized rocks of these common colors.

Except where composed chiefly of sand or coarser stuff, unweathered till is often exceedingly dense. Can you suggest by what means it has been thus compacted? Did the ice fields of the Glacial epoch bear heavy surface moraines like the medial and lateral moraines of valley glaciers? Where was the greater part of the load of these ice fields carried, judging from what you know of the glaciers of Greenland?

BOWLDERS OF THE DRIFT. The pebbles and bowlders of the drift are in part stream gravels, bowlders of weathering, and other coarse rock waste picked up from the surface of the country by the advancing ice, and in part are fragments plucked from ledges of sound rock after the mantle of waste had been removed. Many of the stones of the till are dressed as only glacier ice can do; their sharp edges have been blunted and their sides faceted and scored.

We may easily find all stages of this process represented among the pebbles of the till. Some are little worn, even on their edges; some are planed and scored on one side only; while some in their long journey have been ground down to many facets and have lost much of their original bulk. Evidently the ice played fast and loose with a stone carried in its basal layers, now holding it fast and rubbing it against the rock beneath, now loosening its grasp and allowing the stone to turn.

Bowlders of the drift are sometimes found on higher ground than their parent ledges. Thus bowlders have been left on the sides of Mount Katahdin, Maine, which were plucked from limestone ledges twelve miles distant and three thousand feet lower than their resting place. In other cases stones have been carried over mountain ranges, as in Vermont, where pebbles of Burlington red sandstone were dragged over the Green Mountains, three thousand feet in height, and left in the Connecticut valley sixty miles away. No other geological agent than glacier ice could do this work.

The bowlders of the drift are often large. Bowlders ten and twenty feet in diameter are not uncommon, and some are known whose diameter exceeds fifty feet. As a rule the average size of bowlders decreases with increasing distance from their sources. Why?

TILL PLAINS. The surface of the drift, where left in its initial state, also displays clear proof of its glacial origin. Over large areas it is spread in level plains of till, perhaps bowlder- dotted, similar to the plains of stony clay left in Spitzbergen by the recent retreat of some of the glaciers of that island. In places the unstratified drift is heaped in hills of various kinds, which we will now describe.

DRUMLINS. Drumlins are smooth, rounded hills composed of till, elliptical in base, and having their longer axes parallel to the movement of the ice as shown by glacial scorings. They crowd certain districts in central New York and in southern Wisconsin, where they may be counted by the thousands. Among the numerous drumlins about Boston is historic Bunker Hill.

Drumlins are made of ground moraine. They were accumulated and given shape beneath the overriding ice, much as are sand bars in a river, or in some instances were carved, like roches moutonnees, by an ice sheet out of the till left by an earlier ice invasion.

TERMINAL MORAINES. The glaciated area is crossed by belts of thickened drift, often a mile or two, and sometimes even ten miles and more, in breadth, which lie transverse to the movement of the ice and clearly are the terminal moraines of ancient ice sheets, marking either the limit of their farthest advance or pauses in their general retreat.

The surface of these moraines is a jumble of elevations and depressions, which vary from low, gentle swells and shallow sags to sharp hills, a hundred feet or so in height, and deep, steep- sided hollows. Such tumultuous hills and hummocks, set with depressions of all shapes, which usually are without outlet and are often occupied by marshes, ponds, and lakes, surely cannot be the work of running water. The hills are heaps of drift, lodged beneath the ice edge or piled along its front. The basins were left among the tangle of morainic knolls and ridges as the margin of the ice moved back and forth. Some bowl-shaped basins were made by the melting of a mass of ice left behind by the retreating glacier and buried in its debris.

THE STRATIFIED DRIFT. Like modern glaciers the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were ever being converted into water about their margins. Their limits on the land were the lines where their onward flow was just balanced by melting and evaporation. On the surface of the ice along the marginal zone, rivulets no doubt flowed in summer, and found their way through crevasses to the interior of the glacier or to the ground. Subglacial streams, like those of the Malaspina glacier, issued from tunnels in the ice, and water ran along the melting ice front as it is seen to do about the glacier tongues of Greenland. All these glacier waters flowed away down the chief drainage channels in swollen rivers loaded with glacial waste.

It is not unexpected therefore that there are found, over all the country where the melting ice retreated, deposits made of the same materials as the till, but sorted and stratified by running water. Some of these were deposited behind the ice front in ice-walled channels, some at the edge of the glaciers by issuing streams, and others were spread to long distances in front of the ice edge by glacial waters as they flowed away.

ESKERS are narrow, winding ridges of stratified sand and gravel whose general course lies parallel with the movement of the glacier. These ridges, though evidently laid by running water, do not follow lines of continuous descent, but may be found to cross river valleys and ascend their sides. Hence the streams by which eskers were laid did not flow unconfined upon the surface of the ground. We may infer that eskers were deposited in the tunnels and ice-walled gorges of glacial streams before they issued from the ice front.

KAMES are sand and gravel knolls, associated for the most part with terminal moraines, and heaped by glacial waters along the margin of the ice.

KAME TERRACES are hummocky embankments of stratified drift sometimes found in rugged regions along the sides of valleys. In these valleys long tongues of glacier ice lay slowly melting. Glacial waters took their way between the edges of the glaciers and the hillside, and here deposited sand and gravel in rude terraces.

Outwash plains are plains of sand and gravel which frequently border terminal moraines on their outward face, and were spread evidently by outwash from the melting ice. Outwash plains are sometimes pitted by bowl-shaped basins where ice blocks were left buried in the sand by the retreating glacier.

Valley trains are deposits of stratified drift with which river valleys have been aggraded. Valleys leading outward from the ice front were flooded by glacial waters and were filled often to great depths with trains of stream-swept drift. Since the disappearance of the ice these glacial flood plains have been dissected by the shrunken rivers of recent times and left on either side the valley in high terraces. Valley trains head in morainic plains, and their material grows finer down valley and coarser toward their sources. Their gradient is commonly greater than that of the present rivers.

THE EXTENT OF THE DRIFT. The extent of the drift of North America and its southern limits are best seen in Figure 359. Its area is reckoned at about four million square miles. The ice fields which once covered so much of our continent were all together ten times as large as the inland ice of Greenland, and about equal to the enormous ice cap which now covers the antartic regions.

The ice field of Europe was much smaller, measuring about seven hundred and seventy thousand square miles.

CENTERS OF DISPERSION. The direction of the movement of the ice is recorded plainly in the scorings of the rock surface, in the shapes of glaciated hills, in the axes of drumlins and eskers, and in trains of bowlders, when the ledges from which they were plucked can be discovered. In these ways it has been proved that in North America there were three centers where ice gathered to the greatest depth, and from which it flowed in all directions outward. There were thus three vast ice fields,—one the Cordilleran, which lay upon the Cordilleras of British America; one the Keewatin, which flowed out from the province of Keewatin, west of Hudson Bay; and one the LABRADOR ice field, whose center of dispersion was on the highlands of the peninsula of Labrador. As shown in Figure 359, the western ice field extended but a short way beyond the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where perhaps it met the far-traveled ice from the great central field. The Keewatin and the Labrador ice fields flowed farthest toward the south, and in the Mississippi valley the one reached the mouth of the Missouri and the other nearly to the mouth of the Ohio. In Minnesota and Wisconsin and northward they merged in one vast field.

The thickness of the ice was so great that it buried the highest mountains of eastern North America, as is proved by the transported bowlders which have been found upon their summits. If the land then stood at its present height above sea level, and if the average slope of the ice were no more than ten feet to the mile,—a slope so gentle that the eye could not detect it