Lecture V. The Two Great Sculptors – Water And Ice.  Continued…

But we have not yet spoken of the sea, and this surely is not idle in altering the shape of the land. Even the waves themselves in a storm wash against the cliffs and bring down stones and pieces of rock on to the shore below. And they help to make cracks and holes in the cliffs, for as they dash with force against them they compress the air which lies in the joints of the stone and cause it to force the rock apart, and so larger cracks are made and the cliff is ready to crumble.

It is, however, the stones and sand and pieces of rock lying at the foot of the cliff which are most active in wearing it away. Have you never watched the waves breaking upon a beach in a heavy storm? How they catch up the stones and hurl them down again, grinding them against each other! At high tide in such a storm these stones are thrown against the foot of the cliff, and each blow does something towards knocking away part of the rock, till at last, after many storms, the cliff is undermined and large pieces fall down. These pieces are in their turn ground down to pebbles which serve to batter against the remaining rock.

Professor Geikie tells us that the waves beat in a storm against the Bell Rock Lighthouse with as much force as if you dashed a weight of 3 tons against every square inch of the rock, and Stevenson found stones of 2 tons’ weight which had been thrown during storms right over the ledge of the lighthouse. Think what force there must be in waves which can lift up such a rock and throw it, and such force as this beats upon our sea-coasts and eats away the land.

Fig. 28 is a sketch on the shores of Arbroath which I made some years ago. You will not find it difficult to picture to yourselves how the sea has eaten away these cliffs till some of the strongest pieces which have resisted the waves stand out by themselves in the sea. That cave in the left-hand corner ends in a narrow dark passage from which you come out on the other side of the rocks into another bay. Such caves as these are made chiefly by the force of the waves and the air, bringing down pieces of rock from under the cliff and so making a cavity, and then as the waves roll these pieces over and over and grind them against the sides, the hole is made larger. There are many places on the English coast where large pieces of the road are destroyed by the crumbling down of cliffs when they have been undermined by caverns such as these.

Thus, you see, the whole of the beautiful scenery of the sea – the shores, the steep cliffs, the quiet bays, the creeks and caverns – are all the work of the “sculptor” water; and he works best where the rocks are hardest, for there they offer him a good stout wall to batter, whereas in places where the ground is soft it washes down into a gradual gentle slope, and so the waves come flowing smoothly in and have no power to eat away the shore.

And now, what has Ice got to do with the sculpturing of the land? First, we must remember how much the frost does in breaking up the ground. The farmers know this, and always plough after a frost, because the moisture, freezing in the ground, has broken up the clods, and done half their work for them.

But this is not the chief work of ice. You will remember how we learnt in our last lecture that snow, when it falls on the mountains, gradually slides down into the valleys, and is pressed together by the gathering snow behind until it becomes moulded into a solid river of ice (see Fig. 29, Frontispiece). In Greenland and in Norway there are enormous ice-rivers or glaciers, and even in Switzerland some of them are very large. The Aletsch glacier, in the Alps, is fifteen miles long, and some are even longer than this. They move very slowly – on an average about 20 to 27 inches in the centre, and 13 to 19 inches at the sides every twenty-four hours, in the summer and autumn. How they move, we cannot stop to discuss now; but if you will take a slab of thin ice and rest it upon its two ends only, you can prove to yourself that ice does bend, for in a few hours you will find that its own weight has drawn it down in the centre, so as to form a curve. This will help you to picture to yourselves how glaciers can adapt themselves to the windings of the valley, creeping slowly onwards until they come down to a point where the air is warm enough to melt them, and then the ice flows away in a stream of water. It is very curious to see the number of little rills running down the great masses of ice at the glacier’s mouth, bringing down with them gravel, and every now and then a large stone, which falls splashing into the stream below. If you look at the glacier in the Frontispiece, you will see that these stones come from those long lines of stones and boulders stretching along the sides and centre of the glacier. It is easy to understand where the stones at the side come from; for we have seen that damp and frost cause pieces to break off the surface of the rocks, and it is natural that these pieces should roll down the steep sides of the mountains on to the glacier. But the middle row requires some explanation. Look to the back of the picture, and you will see that this line of stones is made of two side rows, which come from the valleys above. Two glaciers, you see, have there joined into one, and so made a heap of stones all along their line of junction.

These stones are being continually, though slowly, conveyed by the glacier, from all the mountains along its sides, down to the place where it melts. Here it lets them fall, and they are gradually piled up till they form great walls of stone, which are called moraines. Some of the moraines left by the larger glaciers of olden time, in the country near Turin, form high hills, rising up even to 1500 feet.

Therefore, if ice did no more than carry these stone blocks, it would alter the face of the country; but it does much more than this. As the glacier moves along, it often cracks for a considerable way across its surface, and this crack widens and widens, until at last it becomes a great gaping chasm, or crevasse as it is called, so that you can look down it right to the bottom of the glacier. Into these crevasses large blocks of rock fall, and when the chasm is closed again as the ice presses on, these masses are frozen firmly into the bottom of the glacier, much in the same way as a steel cutter is fixed in the bottom of a plane. And they do just the same kind of work; for as the glacier slides down the valley, they scratch and grind the rocks underneath them, rubbing themselves away, it is true, but also scraping away the ground over which they move. In this way the glacier becomes a cutting instrument, and carves out the valleys deeper and deeper as it passes through them.

You may always know where a glacier has been, even if no trace of ice remains; for you will see rocks with scratches along them which have been cut by these stones; and even where the rocks have not been ground away, you will find them rounded like those in the left-hand of the Frontispiece, showing that the glacier- plane has been over them. These rounded rocks are called “roches moutonnees,” because at the distance they look like sheep lying down.

You have only to look at the stream flowing from the mouth of a glacier to see what a quantity of soil it has ground off from the bottom of the valley; for the water is thick, and coloured a deep yellow by the mud it carries. This mud soon reaches the rivers into which the streams run; and such rivers as the Rhone and the Rhine are thick with matter brought down from the Alps. The Rhone leaves this mud in the Lake of Geneva, flowing out at the other end quite clear and pure. A mile and a half of land has been formed at the head of the lake since the time of the Romans by the mud thus brought down from the mountains.

Thus we see that ice, like water, is always busy carving out the surface of the earth, and sending down material to make new land elsewhere. We know that in past ages the glaciers were much larger than they are in our time; for we find traces of them over large parts of Switzerland where glaciers do not now exist, and huge blocks which could only have been carried by ice, and which are called “erratic blocks,” some of them as big as cottages, have been left scattered over all the northern part of Europe. These blocks were a great puzzle to scientific men till, in 1840, Professor Agassiz showed that they must have been brought by ice all the way from Norway and Russia.

In those ancient days, there were even glaciers in England; for in Cumberland and in Wales you may see their work, in scratched and rounded rocks, and the moraines they have left. Llanberis Pass, so famous for its beauty, is covered with ice-scratches, and blocks are scattered all over the sides of the valley. There is one block high up on the right-hand slope of the valley, as you enter from the Beddgelert side, which is exactly poised upon another block, so that it rocks to and fro. It must have been left thus balanced when the ice melted round it. You may easily see that these blocks were carried by ice, and not by water, because their edges are sharp, whereas if they had been rolled in water, they would have been smoothed down.

We cannot here go into the history of that great Glacial Period long ago, when large fields of ice covered all the north of England; but when you read it for yourselves and understand the changes on the earth’s surface which we can see being made by ice now, then such grand scenery as the rugged valleys of Wales, with large angular stone blocks scattered over them, will tell you a wonderful story of the ice of bygone times.

And now we have touched lightly on the chief ways in which water and ice carve out the surface of the earth. We have seen that rain, rivers, springs, the waves of the sea, frost, and glaciers all do their part in chiselling out ravines and valleys, and in producing rugged peaks or undulating plains – here cutting through rocks so as to form precipitous cliffs, there laying down new land to add to the flat country – in one place grinding stones to powder, in others piling them up in gigantic ridges. We cannot go a step into the country without seeing the work of water around us; every little gully and ravine tells us that the sculpture is going on; every stream, with its burden of visible or invisible matter, reminds us that some earth is being taken away and carried to a new spot. In our little lives we see indeed but the very small changes, but by these we learn how greater ones have been brought about, and how we owe the outline of all our beautiful scenery, with its hills and valleys, its mountains and plains, its cliffs and caverns, its quiet nooks and its grand rugged precipices, to the work of the “Two great sculptors, Water and Ice.”

 

Go to Lecture 6-Part 1 here.