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?
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