Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Some of the performances of this great glacier in the region adjacent
to the Delaware are remarkable. It has carried huge granite boulders
from the far north and planted them all along the summit of the
Kittatinny where it crossed. It has torn out big pieces of limestone,
some of them thirty feet long, from their beds in Monroe County, north
of this range, carried them in the ice more than a thousand feet up
its steep northern face and over the summit, finally dropping them on
the south side in the moraine in the slate valley of Northampton.
These immense limestone rocks made comparatively short journeys, but
one ponderous boulder of syenite from the Adirondacks was found in
Northampton, well rounded and dressed, having travelled in the ice at
least two hundred miles. There has also been found a "glacial groove"
upon the rocks of the Kittatinny near the Water Gap, where some
ponderous fragment, imbedded in the ice, as it moved along has gouged
out a great scratch six feet wide and seventy feet in length. Although
this ice had evidently resistless power in its slow motion, yet it
seems to have had small influence upon the topography of the country.
It appears to have merely "sand-papered" the surfaces of the rocks. It
passed bodily across the sharp edges of the upright sandstone strata
of the Kittatinny, yet has not had appreciable effect in cutting the
ridge down, the glaciated portion east of the "Wind Gap" appearing as
high and as sharply defined as the unglaciated part to the westward of
the moraine. The glacier made many lakes north of the moraine, due to
the "kettle holes" and obstruction of streams by unequal deposits of
drift. It is inferred in the estimates of the duration of the glacier,
from astronomical data, that the cold period began two hundred and
eighty thousand years ago, the greatest cold being many thousand years
later. The intense cold began moderating eighty thousand years ago,
but the sea of ice remained long afterwards, and steadily diminished
under the increasing heat. So many thousand years being required for
melting, there are data inducing the belief that the ice-cap did not
retreat from this part of the country back to Greenland until within
ten thousand or fifteen thousand years ago. Then came the floods of
water from the melting glacier, and it is significant that the Indians
in the spacious valley northwest of the Kittatinny called that fertile
region the "Minisink," meaning "the waters have gone," indicating
their legendary memory of the floods following the melting and retreat
of the glacier and the final outflow of its waters.
THE DELAWARE WATER GAP.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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