The Old Ice Flood

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Title:     The Old Ice Flood
Author: John Burroughs [More Titles by Burroughs]

I

He was a bold man who first conceived the idea of the great continental ice-sheet which in Pleistocene times covered most of the northern part of the continent, and played such a part in shaping the land as we know it. That bold man was Agassiz, who, however, was not bold enough to accept the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin. The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with Agassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of evolution did. It was a bold generalization, this of the continental ice-sheet, one of the master-strokes of the scientific imagination. It was about the year 1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciers of the Alps, went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old glaciers, and he found them at once when he landed near Glasgow. We can all find them now on almost every walk we take to the fields and hills; but until our eyes are opened, how blind we are to them! We are like people who camp on the trail of an army and never suspect an army has passed, though the ruts made by their wagons and artillery and the ruins of their intrenchments are everywhere visible.

When I was a boy on the farm we never asked ourselves questions about the stones and rocks that encumbered the land--whence they came, or what the agency was that brought them. The farmers believed the land was created just as we saw it--stones, boulders, soil, gravel-pits, hills, mountains, and all--and doubtless wished in their hearts that the Creator had not been so particular about the rocks and stones, or had made an exception in favor of their own fields. Rocks and stones were good for fences and foundations, and for various other uses, but they were a great hindrance to the cultivation of the soil. I once heard a farmer boast that he had very strong land--it had to be strong to hold up such a crop of rocks and stones. When the Eastern farmer moved west into the prairie states, or south into the cotton-growing states, he probably never asked himself why the Creator had not cumbered the ground with rocks and stones in those sections, as he had in New York and New England. South of the line that runs irregularly through middle New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on to the Rockies, he will find few loose stones scattered over the soil, no detached boulders sitting upon the surface, no hills or mounds of gravel and sand, no clay banks packed full of rounded stones, little and big, no rocky floors under the soil which look as if they had been dressed down by a huge but dulled and nicked jack-plane. The reason is that the line I have indicated marks the limit of the old ice-sheet which more than a hundred thousand years ago covered all the northern part of the continent to a depth of from two to four thousand feet, and was the chief instrument in rounding off mountain-tops, scattering rock-fragments, little and big, over our landscapes, grinding down and breaking off the protruding rock strata, building up our banks of mingled clay and stone, changing the courses of streams and rivers, deepening and widening our valleys, transplanting boulders of one formation for hundreds of miles, and dropping them upon the surface of another formation. When it began to melt and retreat, it was the chief agent in building up our river terraces, and our long, low, rounded hills of sand and gravel and clay, called kames and drumlins. In many of our valleys its flowing waters left long, low ridges, gentle in outline, made up entirely of sand and gravel, or of clay. In other places it left moraines made up of earth, gravel, and rock-fragments that make a very rough streak through the farmer's land. All those high, level terraces along the Hudson, such as that upon which West Point stands, were the work of the old ice-sheet that once filled the river valley. The melting ice was also the chief agent in building up the enormous clay-banks that are found along the shores of the Hudson. The clay formed in very still waters, the sand and gravel in more active waters.

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.

Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five or six hundred feet above tidewater, there is a bold rocky point upon which the old ice-sheet bore heavily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. The great hand in this case moved from the northeast and must have fairly made this rocky prominence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched and grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered away, leaving the rock quite rough; its general outlines alone tell the tale of the battle with the ice. But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached and toppled over, turning topsy-turvy before it had weathered, and it lies in such a position, upheld by two rock fragments, that its glaciated surface, though protected from the weather, is clearly visible. You step down two or three feet between the two upholding rocks and are at the entrance of a little cave, and there before you, standing at an angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page written over with the history of the passing of the great ice plane. The surface exposed is ten or twelve feet long, and four or five feet wide, and it is as straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves are as sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I often take the college girls there who come to visit me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice gods left their signatures. The girls take turns in stooping down and looking along the under surface of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and marveling. They have read or heard about these things, but the reading or hearing made little impression upon their minds. When they see a concrete example, and feel it with their hands, they are impressed. Then when I tell them that there is not a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one time two or three thousand feet thick above the place where they now stand, and that it bore down upon Julian's Rock with a weight of thousands of tons to the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson River Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of miles around them, riding over the tops of the Catskills and of the Adirondacks, and wearing them down and carrying fragments of rock torn from them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest,--when I have told them all of this, I have usually given them a mouthful too big for them to masticate or swallow. As a sort of abstract proposition contained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it have been so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond our horizon--beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and become familiar with the idea of them, before it can give any sort of rational assent to them. It has taken the geologist a long time to work out and clear up and confirm this conception of the great continental glacier which in Pleistocene times covered so large a part of the northern hemisphere. It is now as well established as any event in the remote past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss Alps, one may see the ice doing exactly what the Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this country.

 

II

The other day in passing a farmer's house I saw where he had placed a huge, roundish boulder, nearly as high as a man's head, by the roadside and had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of his father before him, and that of the first settler upon the farm, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was an interesting monument. I learned that the rock had been found in the bed of a small creek near by, and that the farmer had given a hundred dollars to have it moved to its place in front of his house. Had I seen the old farmer I am sure I could have added to his interest and pride in his monument by telling him that it was Adiron-dack gneiss, and had been brought from that region on the back, or in the maw, of a glacier, many tens of thousands of years ago. But it is highly probable that, were he an uneducated man, he would have treated my statement with contempt or incredulity. Education does at least this for a man: it opens his mind and makes him less skeptical about things not dreamed of in his philosophy.

This boulder had been rolled and worn in its long, slow ride till it was nearly round. I have a much smaller boulder, probably from the same quarry, which I planted at the head of my garden for a seat when the hoe gets tired. When it was dropped here on the land that is now my field, the bed and valley of the Hudson were occupied by the old glacier which, during its decline and recession, built up the terraces opposite me (where now stands a multimillionaire's copy of an Italian palace), and which added to and uncovered the river slopes where now my own vineyards are planted.

The flowing or the creeping of this old ice-sheet, so that it could transport large boulders hundreds of miles, is one of the most remarkable things about it: as slow or slower than the hour-hand of the clock, yet an actual progression, carrying it, in the course of thousands of years, from its apex in Labrador well down into New Jersey, where its terminal moraine is still clearly traceable.

A river of ice, under the right conditions, flows as literally as a river of water, fastest in the middle, and slowest along its margins where the friction is greatest. The old ice-sheet, or ice sea, flowed around and over mountains as a river flows around and over rocks. Where a mountain rose above the glacier, the ice divided and flowed round it, and reunited again beyond it. One may see all this in Alaska at the present time. Water, of course, flows because of its own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has to be vastly greater. A drop of water on the table does not flow, but, pile it high enough, and it will. The old ice sea flowed mainly south, not because it was downhill in that direction, but because the accumulation of ice and snow at the North was so great. If through any climatic changes, the snowfall were ever again to be so great that more snow should fall in winter than could melt in summer, after the lapse of thousands of years, we should have another ice age.

[The end]
John Burroughs's essay: The Old Ice Flood

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