To this genial interglacial epoch succeeded the last glacial epoch,
when a great ice-sheet once more enveloped a wide area. In the extreme
east this latest _mer de glace_ appears to have reached as far south
as that of the earlier epoch; but as we follow its terminal moraines
westward they lead us further and further away from the southern
limits attained by the preceding ice-sheet. These great terminal
moraines form an interesting study, and the general results obtained by
American observers have been very carefully put together by Professor
Chamberlin. I traversed wide regions of those moraines in Indiana,
Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and, so far as my observations
went, I could only confirm the conclusions arrived at by Professor
Chamberlin and others. The mounds, banks, cones, and ridges are
unquestionably moraines--of enormous dimensions, no doubt, but in all
their phenomena strictly analogous to similar gravelly moraines in our
own country and the Continent. Many of the American moraines consist
almost entirely of water-worn material--sand, gravel, shingle, and
boulders, together with large angular and sub-angular erratics. These
deposits are generally stratified, and frequently show diagonal or
false-bedding. In this and other respects they exactly reproduce--but
of course on a much larger scale--our Scottish kames, and the similar
accumulations of north Germany and Finland, and the low-grounds of
Italy opposite the mouths of the great Alpine lakes. The kames of
Wisconsin again and again reminded me of the gravelly moraines that
cover the ground for many miles round the lower end of Lake Garda.
It is this gravelly and sandy aspect of the American moraines that
is most conspicuous, water-assorted materials seeming everywhere to
form their upper and outer portions. Now and again, however, a deep
cutting discloses underneath and behind such water-worn detritus a
mass of confused materials, consisting of clay, sand, gravel, shingle,
and boulders, which are angular and sub-angular, often smoothed and
striated, and of all shapes and sizes. According to Mr. Chamberlin,
this unstratified material "is indistinguishable from true till, and
is doubtless to be regarded as till pushed up into corrugations by the
mechanical action of the ice."
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