Earth Sculpture; Or, The Origin of Land-forms

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G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1898 - Erosion - 397 pages

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Page 366 - THERE rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen ! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Page 331 - ... position, undisturbed by crustal oscillation, for a prolonged period of time, they will eventually be cut back by the sea. In this way a shelf or terrace will be formed, narrow in some places, broader in others, according to the resistance offered by the varying character of the rocks. But no long inlets or fiords can result from such action. At most the harder and less readily demolished rocks will form headlands, while shallow bays will be scooped out of the more yielding masses. In short,...
Page 67 - Those who have long and carefully studied the Grand Canon of the Colorado do not hesitate for a moment to pronounce it by far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles. If its sublimity consisted only in its dimensions, it could be sufficiently set forth, in a single sentence. It is more than 200 miles long, from 5 to 12 miles wide, and from 5,000 to 6,000 feet deep.
Page 146 - ... Highlands, when viewed from a commanding position, looks like a tumbled ocean in which the waves appear to be moving in all directions. One is also impressed with the fact that the undulations of the surface, however interrupted they may be, are broad — the mountains, however they may vary in detail according to the character of the rocks, are massive, and generally roundshouldered and often somewhat flat-topped, while there is no great disparity of height amongst the dominant points of any...
Page 308 - The following quotation comes after a description of the rock walls of the fiords: Numerous tributary waters, some of which are hardly less important than the head-stream, do indeed pour into the fiord, but they have not yet eroded for themselves deep trenches. After winding through the plateauland in broad and shallow valleys their relatively gentle course is suddenly interrupted^ and they at once cascade down the precipitous rock-walls to the sea. The side-valleys that open upon a fiord are thus...
Page 331 - To sum up, then, we may say that the chief agents concerned in the development of coast-lines are crustal movements, sedimentation, and marine erosion. All the main trends are the result of elevation and depression. Considerable geographical changes, however, have been brought about by the silting up of those shallow and sheltered seas which, in certain regions, overflow wide areas of the continental plateau. Throughout all the ages, indeed, epigene agents have striven to reduce the superficial inequalities...
Page 177 - The lava of the Henry Mountains behaved differently. Instead of rising through all the beds of the earth's crust, it stopped at a lower horizon, insinuated itself between two strata, and opened for itself a chamber by lifting all the superior beds. In this chamber it congealed, forming a massive body of trap.
Page 310 - ... Why should the erosion of the main or fiord-valleys be so immeasurably in advance of that of the lateral valleys ? Obviously there must have been a time when the process of valleyformation proceeded more rapidly along the lines of the present fiords and their head-valleys than in the side-valleys which open upon these from the fjelds. At that time the work of rain and running water could not have been carried on equally over the whole land, otherwise we should find now a completely developed...
Page 178 - They lie in clusters, and each cluster is marked by a mountain. In Mount Ellen there are perhaps thirty laccolites. In Mount Holmes there are two; and in Mount Ellsworth one. Mount Pennell and Mount Hillers each have one large and several small ones.
Page 378 - Second, we have the proofs of former glaciation afforded by striated rocks and roches moutonuees and by the crushed, broken, tumbled, and confused rock surfaces that occur so frequently underneath the bottom or ground moraines. Third, we have the presence of certain remarkable ridges of gravel and sand which appear to have been formed in tunnels under the ice, and of enormous sheets of similar materials which have been spread out by the waters escaping from the terminal front of the inland ice of...

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