THE ROCK SURFACE UNDERLYING THE DRIFT. Over much of its area the
drift rests on firm, fresh rock, showing that both the preglacial
mantle of residual waste and the partially decomposed and broken
rock beneath it have been swept away. The underlying rock,
especially if massive, hard, and of a fine grain, has often been
ground down to a smooth surface and rubbed to a polish as perfect
as that seen on the rock beside an Alpine glacier where the ice
has recently melted back. Frequently it has been worn to the
smooth, rounded hummocks known as roches moutonnees, and even
rocky hills have been thus smoothed to flowing outlines like
roches moutonnees on a gigantic scale. The rock pavement beneath
the drift is also marked by long, straight, parallel scorings,
varying in size from deep grooves to fine striae as delicate as
the hair lines cut by an engraver's needle. Where the rock is soft
or closely jointed it is often shattered to a depth of several
feet beneath the drift, while stony clay has been thrust in among
the fragments into which the rock is broken.
In the presence of these glaciated surfaces we cannot doubt that
the area of the drift has been overridden by vast sheets of ice
which, in their steady flow, rasped and scored the rock bed
beneath by means of the stones with which their basal layers were
inset, and in places plucked and shattered it.
TILL. The unstratified portion of the drift consists chiefly of
sheets of dense, stony clay called till, which clearly are the
ground moraines of ancient continental glaciers. Till is an
unsorted mixture of materials of all sizes, from fine clay and
sand, gravel, pebbles, and cobblestones, to large bowlders. The
stones of the till are of many kinds, some having been plucked
from the bed rock of the locality where they are found, and others
having been brought from outside and often distant places. Land
ice is the only agent known which can spread unstratified material
in such extensive sheets.
The FINE MATERIAL of the till comes from two different sources. In
part it is derived from old residual clays, which in the making
had been leached of the lime and other soluble ingredients of the
rock from which they weathered. In part it consists of sound rock
ground fine; a drop of acid on fresh, clayey till often proves by
brisk effervescence that the till contains much undecayed
limestone flour. The ice sheet, therefore, both scraped up the
mantle of long-weathered waste which covered the coun try before
its coming, and also ground heavily upon the sound rock
underneath, and crushed and wore to rock flour the fragments which
it carried.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account