United States or Cameroon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It will readily be conceded that this hypothesis was preferable to any previous lacustrine theory, by accounting more easily for the temporary existence and entire disappearance of lofty transverse barriers, although the height required for the supposed dams of ice appeared very enormous. Before the idea of glacier-lakes had been suggested by Agassiz, Mr.
To confirm such observations, and to determine whether a similar rate of rise continues eastward, as far as the pass of Muckul, would be most important. On the whole, I conclude that the Glen Roy terrace-lines and those of some neighbouring valleys, were formed on the borders of glacier-lakes, in times long subsequent to the principal glaciation of Scotland.
Buckland, desirous, like the defenders of the lake theory, to account for the limitation of the shelves to certain glens, and their absence in contiguous glens, where the rocks are of the same composition, and the slope and inclination of the ground very similar, first started the theory that these valleys were once blocked up by enormous glaciers descending from Ben Nevis, giving rise to what are called, in Switzerland and in the Tyrol, glacier-lakes.
It has been sometimes objected to the hypothesis of glacier-lakes, as applied to the case of Glen Roy, that the shelves must have taken a very long period for their formation.
The alluvium on the cols or watersheds, before alluded to, is such as would have been formed if the waters of the rivers had been made to flow east, or out of the upper ends of the supposed glacier-lakes, instead of escaping at the lower ends, in a westerly direction, where the great blockages of ice are assumed to have occurred. In addition to these arguments of Mr.
But the reader will have seen that the permanency of level in such glacier-lakes has no necessary connection with minor changes in the height of the supposed dam of ice. If a glacier descending from higher mountains through a tributary glen enters the main valley in which there happens to be no glacier, the river is arrested in its course and a lake is formed.
But if we embrace the theory of glacier-lakes, we must be prepared to assume not only that the sea had nothing to do with the original formation of the "parallel roads," but that it has never, since the disappearance of the lakes, risen in any one of the glens up to the level of the lowest shelf, which is about 850 feet high; for in that case the remarkable persistency and integrity of the roads and deltas, before described, must have been impaired.
He believes these Indian shelves to have originated on the borders of glacier-lakes, the barriers of which were usually formed by the ice and moraines of lateral or tributary glaciers, which descended into and crossed the main valley, as we have supposed in the case of Glen Roy; but others he ascribes to the terminal moraine of the principal glacier itself, which had retreated during a series of milder seasons, so as to leave an interval between the ice and the terminal moraine.
The temporary conversion of these glens into glacier-lakes is the more conceivable, because the hills at their upper ends not being lofty nor of great extent, they may not have been filled with ice at a time when great glaciers were generated in other adjoining and much higher regions. Secondly. The shelves, says Mr.
Jamieson, I may mention that in Switzerland, at present, no testacea live in the cold waters of glacier-lakes; so that the entire absence of fossil shells, whether marine or freshwater, in the stratified materials of each shelf, would be accounted for if the theory above mentioned be embraced. When I examined "the parallel roads" in 1825, in company with Dr.
Word Of The Day