This great ice-sheet not only covered our northern farms with rocks
and stones, and packed the soil with rounded boulders, but it also
carried away much of the rock decay that goes to the making of the
soil, so that the soil is of greater depth in the non-glaciated than
in the glaciated areas of the country. The New-Englander or
New-Yorker in traveling in the Southern States may note the enormous
depth of soil as revealed by the water-courses or railroad cuts. The
ice-sheet was a huge mill that ground up the rocks in the North
probably as fast or faster than the rains and the rank vegetation
reduced them in the South, but the floods of water which it finally
let loose carried a great deal of the rock-waste into the sea.
The glacier milk which colors the streams that flow from beneath it
finally settles and makes clay. Off the great Malaspina Glacier in
Alaska the ocean is tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty
miles from the shores. Very few country people, even among the
educated, are ready to believe that this enormous ice-sheet ever
existed. To make them believe that it is just as much a fact in the
physical history of this continent as the war of the Revolution is a
fact in our political history is no easy matter. It certainly is a
crushing proposition. It so vastly transcends all our experience
with ice and snow, or the experience of the race since the dawn of
history, that only the scientific imagination and faith are equal to
it. The belief in it rests on indubitable evidence, its record is
written all over our landscape, but it requires, I say, the
scientific imagination to put the facts together and make a
continuous history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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