Louis Pope Gratacap

“ These massive streams are carving with remorseless energy the solid rocks, and transporting in their course the trophies of their labor. Yet, strong and magnificent as they now appear, they are but the ghosts of those former seas which swept from peak to wave, and piled upon the flanks of the mountains and the depressions of the coast the huge moraines and the transported bowlders which appear on every hand. These heaps of débris and congeries of rocky fragments lie in the direct extension of the present glaciers, and indicate most strikingly their origin. ”

“ Thus advancing, crevassed, convulsed, and rent into gaping chasms, loaded with blocks of stone, the glaciers are grinding down the everlasting hills and lowering the proud summits of their birthplace to the plain. Imagine half a hemisphere covered by a universal glacier whose powers of abrasion and transportation are proportionately enlarged: will not the appearances we are attempting to explain be adequately accounted for by so tremendous an agent? Let us turn to contemporaneous glaciers of the Alps and elsewhere for an answer. ”

“ The nucleal range we find is beset with numerous branches, whose long axes stretch out in waving and complicated lines from the central ridge, lie furcating and multiplying like tree-limbs as they embank the rivers, or surround occasional basins, into whose fruitful beauty the traveler peers. Clay slate, very micaceous, and passing into sandstone with interstratified limestone, forms the lithological basis of the mountains, and through the passes ramifying veins of quartz and granite. ”

“ Again and again, under varying conditions, may our experimental world be sunk and raised, preserving, possibly, through all the changes the rudimentary outlines of hills and valleys by which it was first characterized and marked. And imagining that every new stratum was ingeniously varied in the color and to some extent in the nature of its mineral constituents, and that, upon each reappearance of this diminutive continent, the skillful experimentalist spread a new form of life, what at last might be, after some exposure to weathering and change, the character of its surface? ”

“ Running for miles inland, and connected with the labyrinth of straits which fimbriate the shores and break the outlines with detached islands, these wonderful expanses expose the most bewitching and lovely scenery which Norway boasts. Glacier, snow-capped mountain, green fields verdant under cultivation, villages, and dizzy cliffs, are exquisitely blended into a diversified panorama of sublimity and beauty. ”

“ The great conduit from the inland sea is the Humboldt Glacier, which extends its glassy wall, 300 feet high, along the deepest water for sixty miles, pouring out incalculable volumes of ice, laden and penetrated with bowlders, trophies of its resistless march from hidden and unknown recesses. ”

“ Long Island is itself but one long dirt-heap: an accumulated pile of continental débris, sand, clay, gravel, intermixed and overlaid by bowlders, is here gathered together into a more or less stratified state, as if, in an enormous denudation of New England, the aggregated material, scoured from its hills and valleys, had been dropped just upon their outskirts in this long detrital barrow or mound. Yet over New England this same deposit is wide-spread ”

“ Immense heaps of débris thus indicate, at the mountain's foot, the accumulated waste of its substance through the years of the glacier's slow and perpetual advance, and also record, as they lie beyond the present wall of the glacier, the past periods of its greatest extension. They grind the beds they pass over, the walls of their stony vaults are polished and inscribed, and the bowlders brought in contact with their stupendous powers of attrition are rubbed into brilliant surfaces and scored with rigid lines. ”

“ Again, the numerous pebbles and stones which are found upon and through the topmost soils, in gravel-beds and sand-heaps, would have been smoothly rounded like beach-worn agates, and not, as they really are, tattooed and etched with fine lines running the length of the stone. In the grooves of the rock, and in the fine lines of the pebbles, we have evidence of a body firmly held upon the engraved surface, and passed along with undeviating directness and irresistible power. ”

“ Bowlders polished and channeled rocks, submarine moraines, abraded and excavated cliffs, are met with everywhere, and Kane counted forty-one ledges, old beaches marking the recession of the sea, which in their succession led from the granitic nucleus, formerly the coast-wall, to the present shore—all typical features of the landscape where glaciers and ice-caps are no longer found. The scenic effects in Greenland are wonderful in the extreme. Appalling cliffs rise in barren and frigid splendor from the broken floors of hummocks, and the peripheral ice-foot ”

“ Greenland stretches down from those vast and unexplored regions, whose limits encircle the pole, in a broad wedge-like peninsula, deeply fissured by fiords and bays, its margins abruptly rising in mural precipices, and bearing upon its bosom the oppression of an illimitable glacier. ”

“ The Alps, after passing up along the eastern boundary of Piedmont, irregularly in long, deep bends and winding arches, run east and west, gathering upon their flanks innumerable lesser ranges, and knots of mountains, or in places subdividing into new and splendid lines of peaks which, diverging to the north, afterward unite with the parent chain or melt into the plain of Germany, through successive steps. ”

“ From the wide central area descend numerous glaciers upon both the eastern and western coasts, and fimbriate by slow erosion the rockbound land. Thus carved, in the long succession of ages, deep fiords penetrate the country, walled by lofty and inaccessible precipices, and terminating at the feet of ice-tongues which protrude their burdens of rock, gravel, mud, and soil, into their waters. In places these deposits shallow the water to great distances; and far from shore, rounded rocks, transported from interior highlands, project their polished summits above the waves. ”

“ In furrows, fifteen and twenty feet deep, upon its surface are sunk strings of rocks imbedded in the icy matrix, and released in occasional showers from its terminal cliffs upon a talus of fragments thus accumulated. In the Shigri Valley and at Zanskar, enormous glaciers are gathered together in companies. Some are literally buried beneath the extraordinary heaps of rocks and detached slabs which are caught upon them from shattered cliff and stony avalanche. They work their way underground, while grass and flowers decorate the desolate covering which conceals them. ”

“ Once more the running stream is stopped, and slowly the muddy tide rises higher and higher, obliterates the lowlands and creeps slowly up the sides of the high ground, around the skirts of its pygmy mountain-chains, and rolls restored amid groups of remade islets. ”

“ These solid masses, fastened like inexorable wedges into the mountain-clefts, possess motion, moving like a river, faster at the top than at the bottom, in the centre than along the sides, and in curves fastest upon the long curve; they, like rivers, also perform the offices of transportation and erosion. Long lines of fragments, detached by frost or avalanche, cover their surfaces in medial and lateral moraines, whose collected masses are poured over the glacier's extremity, where in stream or river it ends its course. ”

“ The expectant eye now notices certain changes: old landmarks are removed from sight, valleys have been converted into plains, new hills have arisen, lakes are seen here and there where before was dry land, new contour lines surround the structural ridges which yet remain, modified indeed, but distinctly recognizable, while the low verdure of grass and the numerous pinnacles of ant-hills have together disappeared beneath a universal blanket of mud. ”

“ Thus over greater portions of the world we find the rocks furrowed, polished, and striated, in long, frequently deep and rectilinear grooves, which lie in groups and series identical in direction, and pointing to associated highlands, or distant continental mountain ranges, as the source of whatever strange and inexorable instrumentalities have produced them. Over New York Island the gneissoid and granitic rocks, where they raise their tilted strata and broken shoulders above the ground, are scored frequently with deep and sinuous channels. ”

“ The peaks of the Loffoden Islands reach above the snow-line, but no adequate footing is afforded for the formation of glaciers, though the islands of Ringvadsö and Kraagen contain glaciers, which in the first instance have pushed their moraines to the water's edge. If we now examine the actual evidence of glacial action, we shall find it analogous to that we have witnessed in the Alps, except that it is perhaps less emphatic. The slaty rock of Norway fails to retain the erosive markings of the ice plough, and has lost frequently its graven surface through frost. ”

“ THE reader may recall standing, when a child, by the side of a toy-dam in the course of some little stream, and, were a breach made in the mimic masonry, remember the mute interest with which he watched the slow emergence of fairy islands as points of rock and shoals of mud slowly appeared above the water's surface—how the detached summits, at first round spots, assumed varied outlines indented with cones or bristling with promontories ”

“ The glaciers occur at the indentations of the shore-line and where the cliffs decline, affording them approach to the waters. Here breaking into gigantic fragments, each one a towering iceberg, or slowly melting in the warmer waters of the sea, they constantly waste away, and are as constantly replenished from the inexhaustible and overflowing reservoirs they have left. ”

“ Suppose this little world so briefly made had been left till the bright sunshine had dried its surface, in some places parched and cracked it, in others evoked a luxuriant growth of grass and flowers, filled its shores with gliding snails and its level mead with teeming ant-hills. ”

“ We find rocks of enormous size, in some instances weighing 3,000 tons, planted in fields and lowlands, or strewed over hills and moors, where no rocks lie in place, sunken in the soil where the lithology of the district is entirely distinct, while that of the monoliths themselves is identical with rock many miles northward. These gigantic bowlders, Titanic mementos of the past, are scattered over Central Europe, over Germany, Holland, and Russia, are identical in character, and can have no nearer origin than in the mountains of Scandinavia. ”

“ Over West Russia and Northern Europe, where the markings are discovered, they indicate the Scandinavian mountains to have been the seat of whatever disturbance or agency has, at a distant period, fluted and engraved the continent; similarly, as the rocks lie related to the Highlands of Scotland, the Lake Hills of England, or the mountains of Wales, the striæ impressed upon them extend toward every point of the compass. They stream north and south from the summits of the Pyrenees, from the peaks of the Caucasus, and down the valleys of the Himalayas. ”

“ A glacier occurs upon the Parang Pass, not of large proportions, which, wedged between the mountains, ruggedly advances, carrying limestone bowlders, and terminating three miles from the head of the pass in a steep precipice one hundred feet high, where its final burdens are discharged down the mountain. Snow-beds or small glaciers are of constant occurrence at the heads of the ravines, and the cool water-brooks which traverse the slopes spring from their melting edges. ”

“ The glaciers of Norway are not so imposing, so numerous, or so accessible, as those of the Alps. The peaks are frequently too isolated and too steep, the valleys too shallow and too small, and the stretches of table-land too frequent, to permit the best exhibition of glacial forms; yet the accumulations of snow are very formidable. The snow-fields of Justedals Bracen, which feed several glaciers, the largest of which is only one-seventh the size of the Aletsch glacier in the Alps, stretch for fifty miles upon one range, and cover an area of four hundred square miles. ”

“ Not only are they found upon level and loamy lands, utterly unaccountable except by the assumptions of transportation, but they are also discovered capping the cliffs of mountain chains, hanging by the side of depths, over which they must have been carried, and into which, by the Nemesis of destiny, they are now doomed to fall. The Jura Mountains, north of the great valley of Switzerland, and opposite the western or Bernese Alps, along the frontier of France, are thus studded with these bowlders, some of them containing 50,000 to 60,000 cubic feet of stone. ”

“ In conclusion, without rehearsing the evidence drawn from the Pyrenees or the Caucasus, where glaciers still exist, we see in the northern and southern hemispheres the imposing remains of primitive areas of ice which in a more congenial era projected their confluent and inter-mingling branches over vast regions of the earth, where, as they have retreated, they have left irrefragable evidence of their power. ”

“ Thus the scores upon the rocks of New England point northwest and southeast, and only local derangements disturb this prevalent direction. The easting increases as we progress to the ocean, reaching its maximum in Maine and the borders of Canada; while, as we retire from the margin of the States, we observe that the scratches and grooves acquire a north-and-south direction, becoming nearly meridional over New York, and then slowly swing round to the west, until in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and the western limits of the continent, they lie pointing northeast and southwest. ”