The beaches of the glacial lakes just mentioned are now far from
horizontal. That of the lake which occupied the Ontario basin has
an elevation of three hundred and sixty-two feet above tide at the
west and of six hundred and seventy-five feet at the northeast,
proving here a differential movement of the land since glacial
times amounting to more than three hundred feet. The beaches which
mark the successive heights of these glacial lakes are not
parallel; hence the warping began before the Glacial epoch closed.
We have already seen that the canting of the region is still in
progress.
THE CHAMPLAIN SUBSIDENCE. As the Glacial epoch approached its end,
and the Labrador ice field melted back for the last time to near
its source, the land on which the ice had lain in eastern North
America was so depressed that the sea now spread far and wide up
the St. Lawrence valley. It joined with Lake Ontario, and
extending down the Champlain and Hudson valleys, made an island of
New England and the maritime provinces of Canada.
The proofs of this subsidence are found in old sea beaches and
sea-laid clays resting on Wisconsin till. At Montreal such
terraces are found six hundred and twenty feet above sea level,
and along Lake Champlain--where the skeleton of a whale was once
found among them--at from five hundred to four hundred feet. The
heavy delta which the Mohawk River built at its mouth in this arm
of the sea now stands something more than three hundred feet above
sea level. The clays of the Champlain subsidence pass under water
near the mouth of the Hudson, and in northern New Jersey they
occur two hundred feet below tide. In these elevations we have
measures of the warping of the region since glacial times.
THE WESTERN UNITED STATES IN GLACIAL TIMES. The western United
States was not covered during the Pleistocene by any general ice
sheet, but all the high ranges were capped with permanent snow and
nourished valley glaciers, often many times the size of the
existing glaciers of the Alps. In almost every valley of the
Sierras and the Rockies the records of these vanished ice streams
may be found in cirques, glacial troughs, roches moutonnecs, and
morainic deposits.
It was during the Glacial epoch that Lakes Bonneville and Lahontan
were established in the Great Basin, whose climate must then have
been much more moist than now.
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