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

about as fast as formed. Against the walls of an abbey built on a slope in Wales seven hundred years ago, the creeping waste has gathered on the uphill side to a depth of seven feet. The slow-flowing sheet of waste is often dammed by fences and walls, whose uphill side gathers waste in a few years so as to show a distinctly higher surface than the downhill side, especially in plowed fields where the movement is least checked by vegetation.

TALUS. At the foot of cliffs there is usually to be found a slope of rock fragments which clearly have fallen from above. Such a heap of waste is known as talus. The amount of talus in any place depends both on the rate of its formation and the rate of its removal. Talus forms rapidly in climates where mechanical disintegration is most effective, where rocks are readily broken into blocks because closely jointed and thinly bedded rather than massive, and where they are firm enough to be detached in fragments of some size instead of in fine grains. Talus is removed slowly where it decays slowly, either because of the climate or the resistance of the rock. It may be rapidly removed by a stream flowing along its base.

In a moist climate a soluble rock, such as massive limestone, may form talus little if any faster than the talus weathers away. A loose-textured sandstone breaks down into incoherent sand grains, which in dry climates, where unprotected by vegetation, may be blown away as fast as they fall, leaving the cliff bare to the base. Cliffs of such slow-decaying rocks as quartzite and granite when closely jointed accumulate talus in large amounts.

Talus slopes may be so steep as to reach THE ANGLE OF REPOSE, i.e. the steepest angle at which the material will lie. This angle varies with different materials, being greater with coarse and angular fragments than with fine rounded grains. Sooner or later a talus reaches that equilibrium where the amount removed from its surface just equals that supplied from the cliff above. As the talus is removed and weathers away its slope retreats together with the retreat of the cliff, as seen in Figure 9.

GRADED SLOPES. Where rocks weather faster than their waste is carried away, the waste comes at last to cover all rocky ledges. On the steeper slopes it is coarser and in more rapid movement than on slopes more gentle, but mountain sides and hills and plains alike come to be mantled with sheets of waste which everywhere is creeping toward the streams. Such unbroken slopes, worn or built to the least inclination at which the waste supplied by weathering can be urged onward, are known as GRADED SLOPES.

Of far less importance than the silent, gradual creep of waste, which is going on at all times everywhere about us, are the startling local and spasmodic movements which we are now to describe.

AVALANCHES. On steep mountain sides the accumulated snows of winter often slip and slide in avalanches to the valleys below. These rushing torrents of snow sweep their tracks clean of waste and are one of Nature's normal methods of moving it along the downhill path.

LANDSLIDES. Another common and abrupt method of delivering waste to streams is by slips of the waste mantle in large masses. After long rains and after winter frosts the cohesion between the waste and the sound rock beneath is loosened by seeping water underground. The waste slips on the rock surface thus lubricated and plunges down the mountain side in a swift roaring torrent of mud and stones.

We may conveniently mention here a second type of landslide, where masses of solid rock as well as the mantle of waste are involved in the sudden movement. Such slips occur when valleys have been rapidly deepened by streams or glaciers and their sides have not yet been graded. A favorable condition is where the strata dip (i.e. incline downwards) towards the valley (Fig. 11), or are broken by joint planes dipping in the same direction. The upper layers, including perhaps the entire mountain side, have been cut across by the valley trench and are left supported only on the inclined surface of the underlying rocks. Water may percolate underground along this surface and loosen the cohesion between the upper and the underlying strata by converting the upper surface of a shale to soft wet clay, by dissolving layers of a limestone, or by removing the cement of a sandstone and converting it into loose sand. When the inclined surface is thus lubricated the overlying masses may be launched into the valley below. The solid rocks are broken and crushed in sliding and converted into waste consisting, like that of talus, of angular unsorted fragments, blocks of all sizes being mingled pellmell with rock meal and dust. The principal effects of landslides may be gathered from the following examples.

At Gohna, India, in 1893, the face of a spur four thousand feet high, of the lower ranges of the Himalayas, slipped into the gorge of the headwaters of the Ganges River in successive rock falls which lasted for three days. Blocks of stone were projected for a mile, and clouds of limestone dust were spread over the surrounding country. The debris formed a dam one thousand feet high, extending for two miles along the valley. A lake gathered behind this barrier, gradually rising until it overtopped it in a little less than a year. The upper portion of the dam then broke, and a terrific rush of water swept down the valley in a wave which, twenty miles away, rose one hundred and sixty feet in height. A narrow lake is still held by the strong base of the dam.

In 1896, after forty days of incessant rain, a cliff of sandstone slipped into the Yangtse River in China, reducing the width of the channel to eighty yards and causing formidable rapids.

At Flims, in Switzerland, a prehistoric landslip flung a dam eighteen hundred feet high across the headwaters of the Rhine. If spread evenly over a surface of twenty-eight square miles, the material would cover it to a depth of six hundred and sixty feet. The barrier is not yet entirely cut away, and several lakes are held in shallow basins on its hummocky surface.

A slide from the precipitous river front of the citadel hill of Quebec, in 1889, dashed across Champlain Street, wrecking a number of houses and causing the death of forty-five persons. The strata here are composed of steeply dipping slate.

In lofty mountain ranges there may not be a single valley without its traces of landslides, so common there is this method of the movement of waste, and of building to grade over-steepened slopes.

ROCK SCULPTURE BY WEATHERING

We are now to consider a few of the forms into which rock masses are carved by the weather.

BOWLDERS OF WEATHERING. In many quarries and outcrops we may see that the blocks into which one or more of the uppermost layers have been broken along their joints and bedding planes are no longer angular, as are those of the layers below. The edges and corners of these blocks have been worn away by the weather. Such rounded cores, known as bowlders of weathering, are often left to strew the surface.

DIFFERENTIAL WEATHERING. This term covers all cases in which a rock mass weathers differently in different portions. Any weaker spots or layers are etched out on the surface, leaving the more resistant in relief. Thus massive limestones become pitted where the weather drills out the weaker portions. In these pits, when once they are formed, moisture gathers, a little soil collects, vegetation takes root, and thus they are further enlarged until the limestone may be deeply honeycombed.

On the sides of canyons, and elsewhere where the edges of strata are exposed, the harder layers project as cliffs, while the softer weather back to slopes covered with the talus of the harder layers above them. It is convenient to call the former cliff makers and the latter slope makers.

Differential weathering plays a large part in the sculpture of the land. Areas of weak rock are wasted to plains, while areas of hard rock adjacent are still left as hills and mountain ridges, as in the valleys and mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. But in such instances the lowering of the surface of the weaker rock is also due to the wear of streams, and especially to the removal by them from the land of the waste which covers and protects the rocks beneath.

Rocks owe their weakness to several different causes. Some, such as beds of loose sand, are soft and easily worn by rains; some, as limestone and gypsum for example, are soluble. Even hard insoluble rocks are weak under the attack of the weather when they are closely divided by joints and bedding planes and are thus readily broken up into blocks by mechanical agencies.

OUTLIERS AND MONUMENTS. As cliffs retreat under the attack of the weather, portions are left behind where the rock is more resistant or where the attack for any reason is less severe. Such remnant masses, if large, are known as outliers. When

Note the rain furrows on the slope at the foot of the monuments. In the foreground are seen fragments of petrified trunks of trees, composed of silica and extremely resistant to the weather. On the removal of the rock layers in which these fragments were imbedded they are left to strew the surface in the same way as are the residual flints of southern Missouri. flat-topped, because of the protection of a resistant horizontal capping layer, they are termed mesas,—a term applied also to the flat-topped portions of dissected plateaus (Fig. 129). Retreating cliffs may fall back a number of miles behind their outliers before the latter are finally consumed.

Monuments are smaller masses and may be but partially detached from the cliff face. In the breaking down of sheets of horizontal strata, outliers grow smaller and smaller and are reduced to massive rectangular monuments resembling castles (Fig. 17). The rock castle falls into ruin, leaving here and there an isolated tower; the tower crumbles to a lonely pillar, soon to be overthrown. The various and often picturesque shapes of monuments depend on the kind of rock, the attitude of the strata, and the agent by which they are chiefly carved. Thus pillars may have a capital formed of a resistant stratum. Monuments may be undercut and come to rest on narrow pedestals, wherever they weather more rapidly near the ground, either because of the greater moisture there, or—in arid climates—because worn at their base by drifting sands.

Stony clays disintegrating under the rain often contain bowlders which protect the softer material beneath from the vertical blows of raindrops, and thus come to stand on pedestals of some height. One may sometimes see on the ground beneath dripping eaves pebbles left in the same way, protecting tiny pedestals of sand.

MOUNTAIN PEAKS AND RIDGES. Most mountains have been carved out of great broadly uplifted folds and blocks of the earth's crust. Running water and glacier ice have cut these folds and blocks into masses divided by deep valleys; but it is by the weather, for the most part, that the masses thus separated have been sculptured to the present forms of the individual peaks and ridges.

Frost and heat and cold sculpture high mountains to sharp, tusklike peaks and ragged, serrate crests, where their waste is readily removed.

The Matterhorn of the Alps is a famous example of a mountain peak whose carving by the frost and other agents is in active progress. On its face "scarcely a rock anywhere is firmly attached," and the fall of loosened stones is incessant. Mountain climbers who have camped at its base tell how huge rocks from time to time come leaping down its precipices, followed by trains of dislodged smaller fragments and rock dust; and how at night one may trace the course of the bowlders by the sparks which they strike from the mountain walls. Mount Assiniboine, Canada (Fig. 20), resembles the Matterhorn in form and has been carved by the same agencies.

"The Needles" of Arizona are examples of sharp mountain peaks in a warm arid region sculptured chiefly by temperature changes.

Chemical decay, especially when carried on beneath a cover of waste and vegetation, favors the production of rounded knobs and dome-shaped mountains.

THE WEATHER CURVE. We have seen that weathering reduces the angular block quarried by the frost to a rounded bowlder by chipping off its corners and smoothing away its edges. In much the same way weathering at last reduces to rounded hills the earth blocks cut by streams or formed in any other way. High mountains may at first be sculptured by the weather to savage peaks (Fig. 181), but toward the end of their life history they wear down to rounded hills (Fig. 182). The weather