The Romance of Modern Geology: Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal life — John Shaqi
The Romance of Modern Geology: Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal lifeGrew, Edwin Sharpe
Science
The Romance of Modern Geology: Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal life
Grew, Edwin Sharpe
Geology; Paleontology
of stones, ever adding to their numbers, are deposited in heaps, to
which are given the name of the _terminal moraine_.
With such tokens of their existence as this, glaciers, as will
readily be understood, leave visiting-cards in history that cannot
easily be mistaken. Even existing glaciers tell strange stories.
Nowadays glaciers are carefully measured and examined both in
Switzerland and in Canada. During the last decade of the nineteenth
century and the first decade of the twentieth the Swiss glaciers
were found to show signs of receding farther up their valleys. The
same thing has been observed about some of the Canadian glaciers.
There are several plausible reasons for this. Professor Schaeberle
says that the earth is growing cooler, and that in the temperate
regions the winter rainfall (which would turn to falls of snow
in the mountains) is less than it has been. It is certain that a
shortage of winter rain over a number of years in succession would
account for the shrinkage of the glaciers, but it is not by any
means certain that a number of dry winters will not be followed by
wet ones, in which case the glaciers would increase again. Some of
the glaciers show that during their existence they have shrunk and
lengthened alternately like gutta-percha in a variable climate. How
do we know that they have shrunk and lengthened? The _moraines_ of
which we have spoken give us the testimony. As a glacier shrinks
either in length or in breadth and depth it leaves the blocks of
rock at its edges stranded on the sides of the valley. Such perched
blocks or _erratics_ are the best of glacier marks, and their great
size, some of them as large as a cheap villa residence, is such that
no current of water could have brought them there. They are often
poised on the tops of crags, on the very edges of precipices, or on
steep slopes, where they could never have been left by any flood,
even had the flood been able to move them. The only thing that could
have carried them must have been a vehicle that moved very, very
slowly and deposited them very, very gently--in fact, glacier ice.
We can see blocks like this on the glaciers now, and others stranded
at the sides. In the Swiss valleys the scattered ice-borne boulders
may be seen by hundreds far above the glaciers and far beyond the
places where the glaciers end. We _know_ they must have been left
by glaciers, and by inference we surmise that when we find a valley
filled with them, then, though the valley may have no glacier now,
it must have once been occupied by one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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