Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
I descended to my camp, full of anxious anticipations for the morrow;
while the novelty of the scene, and its striking character, the
complexity of the phenomena, the lake-bed, the stupendous
ice-deposited moraine, and its remoteness from any existing ice, the
broad valley and open character of the country, were all marked out
as so many problems suddenly conjured up for my unaided solution, and
kept me awake for many hours. I had never seen a glacier or moraine
on land before, but being familiar with sea ice and berg transport,
from voyaging in the South Polar regions, I was strongly inclined to
attribute the formation of this moraine to a period when a glacial
ocean stood high on the Himalaya, made fiords of the valleys, and
floated bergs laden with blocks from the lateral gulleys, which the
winds and currents would deposit along certain lines. On the
following morning I carried a barometer to the top of the moraine,
which proved to be upwards of 700 feet above the floor of the valley,
and 400 above the dry lake-bed which it bounded, and to which we
descended on our route up the valley. The latter was grassy and
pebbly, perfectly level, and quite barren, except a very few pines at
the bases of the encircling mountains, and abundance of
rhododendrons, _Andromeda_ and juniper on the moraines. Isolated
moraines occurred along both flanks of the valley, some higher than
that I have described, and a very long one was thrown nearly across
from the upper end of another lateral gulley on the east side, also
leading up to the glaciers of Nango. This second moraine commenced a
mile and a half above the first, and abutting on the east flank of
the valley, stretched nearly across, and then curving round, ran down
it, parallel to and near the west flank, from which it was separated
by the Yangma river: it was abruptly terminated by a conical hill of
boulders, round whose base the river flowed, entering the dry
lake-bed from the west, and crossing it in a south-easterly direction
to the western extremity of the great moraine.
The road, on its ascent to the second moraine, passed over an immense
accumulation of glacial detritus at the mouth of the second lateral
valley, entirely formed of angular fragments of gneiss and granite,
loosely bound together by felspathic sand. The whole was disposed in
concentric ridges radiating from the mouth of the valley, and
descending to the flat; these were moraines _in petto,_ formed by the
action of winter snow and ice upon the loose debris. A stream flowed
over this debris, dividing into branches before reaching the
lake-bed, where its waters were collected, and whence it meandered
southward to fall into the Yangma.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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