It has the distinction of being the largest of all the ice-sculptured cirques on Mount Rainier, and one of the grandest in the world.
The large size of the empty cirques and canyons, moreover, leads one to infer that many of these new glaciers far exceeded in volume the ice streams descending the volcano's sides.
Cirques and glaciated valleys rapidly lose their characteristic forms after the ice has withdrawn.
As cirques are thus formed and enlarged the peaks beneath which they lie are sharpened, and the mountain crests are scalloped and cut back from either side to knife-edged ridges.
We may at once accept the conclusion that the invariable association of the cirquesand steepened profiles with snowfields proves that snow is the predominant modifying agent.
The retreat of the steps, the abrasion of the rock, and the sapping of the cirques at the valley heads excavated the upper valleys so deeply that they are nearly all, as W.
Our questions are answered at once by the indisputable facts that many schrunds occur well toward the upper limit of snow, and that many cirques exist whose snowfields are not at all broken by schrunds.
A third condition outside the hypothesis and contradictory to it is the absence of a bergschrund in snowfields at many valleys heads where cirques are well developed!
The side walls were steepened and precipitous cirques were formed at the valley heads.
A common feature of cirques that finds an explanation in the proposed hypothesis is the notch that commonly occurs at some point where a convergence of slopes above the main cirque wall concentrates snow discharge.
Some of the glaciers were over a thousand feet thick; a few were nearly two thousand feet thick, and the cirques that fed them held snow and ice at least a half mile deep.
In spite of his own caution with respect to the use of his meager data, his hypothesis has been applied in an entirely too confident manner to all kinds of cirques under all kinds of conditions.
This brings up the second and third of our main considerations, that the bergschrund does not always or even in many cases reach the foot of the cirque wall, and that cirques exist in many cases where bergschrunds are totally absent.
The glaciers are now almost extinct and their action is confined to the deepening and steepening of the cirquesat the valley heads.
The cirques now partly filled with damp snow must then have been overflowing with dry snow above and ice below.
The minimum conditions of snow motion and the bearing of the conclusions upon the formation of cirques have been described in the chapters immediately preceding.
At the heads of the valleys there are often cirques or plateaux, which again are markedly discordant, hanging high above the valley below.
We need not stop to discuss the probable cause of this step and stair arrangement, which presents much the same problem as the series of cirques at the head of the valley.
A series of cirques means a succession of glacial and interglacial periods.
In some instances, if several cirques occur near together, the side walls may be eroded through, so that a shelf is produced, as one might produce a bench by putting two chairs side by side, and cutting away the contiguous arms.
It quite often happens in the case of high mountains in the Alps that the topmost of such a series of cirques still retains a glacier, what is called a dead glacier, that is, one which has practically ceased to move.
Diagrams to illustrate the progressive investment of an upland by cirques with the formation of comb ridges, cols, and horns.
A further continuation of the process removes all traces of the earlier upland, for the cirques intersect from opposite sides and thus yield palisades of sharp rock pinnacles which rise on precipitous walls from a terraced floor.
Subordinate small cirques in the amphitheater on the west face of the Wannehorn above the Great Aletsch Glacier of Switzerland.
Definite cirques do not develop well under these circumstances, and the loose materials of which such peaks are always composed are attacked in somewhat irregular fashion from the different sides.
With the gradual invasion of the upland upon which the cirques have made their attack, the area from which winds may gather up the snow is steadily diminished, and hence cirque recession is correspondingly retarded.
The partial investment bycirques of a mountain upland yields a type of topography quite unlike that produced by any other geological process.
Niches and cirques in the same vicinity in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming.
From the subordinate cirques surrounding this village descend the Gorner, Findelen, St. Theodul, and other components of this radiating glacier.
If the British Isles are visited and the more rugged areas are selected, one may study the cirques and other characteristic features due to the presence of mountain glaciers about Snowdon (Chap.
At this stage intensive frostwork, the characteristic high level weathering, begins, and cirques develop above the scars of those earlier amphitheaters formed in the advancing hemicycle.
There are passes to be crossed which carry one through concentric cirques of toothed granite to ridges from which the High Sierra spreads before the eye a frothing sea of snowy peaks.
Imagine ranges glacier-bitten alternately on either side with cirques of three or four thousand feet of precipitous depth.
There are no pinnacled heights, no stratified, minareted walls, no precipiced cirques and glacier-shrouded peaks.
It is these cirquesand valleys which constitute Glacier's unique feature, which make it incomparable of its kind.
Armed with sharp hard-cutting tools ripped from the granite cirques of Sierra's crest, these mad rivers must have scratched and hewn deep and fast.
They are but the stubs or remnants of large glaciers, and their presence is due in part to the deep, cool cirques cut out by the former ice-flows, and in part to the snows swept to them by prevailing westerly winds.
These cirques frequently lie close together, separated by a thin precipitous wall, or ridge.
The eastern summit of this range is precipitous and is deeply cut by numerous ice-worn cirques which extend at right angles to the trend of this range.
Others lie back in fountain cirques walled in all around save at the lower edge over which they pour in blue cascades.
As cirques are thus formed and enlarged the peaks beneath which they lie are sharpened, and the mountain crests are scalloped and cut back from either side to knife-edged ridges (Figs.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "cirques" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
