The disposition and composition of moraines enable them to be always recognized, even when they are no longer adjacent to a glacier nor immediately surround its lower extremities.
These traces become less distinct in proportion to their distance from the glacier, and, since they are also often traversed by torrents, they are not as continuous as the moraines which are nearer to the glaciers.
As the ice sheet slowly receded it left minor moraines all along its course.
Letting himself down these steep chimneys, he found himself at last, on Tuesday evening, on the high moraines of the Zmutt Glacier.
Medial moraines are formed by the junction of glaciers, their lateral moraines joining.
Moraines are deposits of debris, piled up by the ice itself.
With two exceptions each of the large moraines incloses a lake.
In Europe the most accurate chronology is that of Baron de Geer on the terminal moraines and related marine clays of northern Sweden.
Gravel bed and old river deposit, recognized by Boule as belonging to the moraines of the fourth glaciation.
The moraines and drifts of the lesser glaciations, such as the first and fourth, stand considerably within the boundaries of these outer moraines and drift fields.
Rhone and of the Rhine and left their moraines at very distant points.
That these glaciers were all prior to the period of the Lower Palaeolithic Acheulean culture is proven by the fact that Acheulean implements are frequently met with lying on the surface of the moraines laid down by these ancient ice-floes.
At the headlands and in irregular spots the gneissic base rock and portions of moraines lie exposed, offering a succession of interesting spots for a visit in search of geological specimens.
There are nomoraines on the surface of the glacier either.
In corroboration of this view, they contended that the alluvium of Glen Roy, as well as of other parts of Scotland, agrees in character with the moraines of glaciers seen in the Alpine valleys of Switzerland.
The theory explaining the medial moraines of glaciers, is that two or more glaciers come down the gorges and upper valleys of the mountain.
Several medial moraines retain their individual line until the great precipice is reached.
When two such glaciers meet and run into and form one, then the inner lateral morainesunite and are borne along by the enlarged glacier.
The materials forming moraines being, however, comparatively loose, are easily cut through by streams.
Many ancientmoraines occur far beyond the present region of glaciers.
Above the fork, the valley contracts extremely, and its bed is covered with moraines and landslips, which often bury the larches and pines.
I have elsewhere noticed that in Sikkim, the ancient moraines above 9000 feet are almost invariably deposited from valleys opening to the westward.
We followed the course of an affluent, called the Chachoo, along whose bed ancient moraines rose in successive ridges: on these I found several other species of European genera.
Ancient moraines surrounding the lower lake-bed in the Yangma valley (looking west).
The moraines were all accumulated in a sort of delta, through which the lateral river debouched into the Kambachen, and were all deposited more or less parallel to the course of the lateral valley, but curving outwards from its mouth.
Sherzer has named these 'Block Moraines' in distinction to ordinary moraines composed of ice-worn, rounded boulders imbedded in a species of cement, commonly known as boulder clay.
Sherzer cut down trees growing between the two moraines and counted the rings of growth.
The question is: How and at what time were these block moraines formed.
Professor Sherzer points to the probability of seismic disturbances being the cause of these block moraines and that the material of which they are formed had been shaken from the peaks to the snow-field below.
The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions.
The terminal moraines (those which are pushed in front of the glaciers) cover something like twenty square miles of country.
Thus moraines broaden, until near the terminus of a glacier they may coalesce in a wide field of stony waste.
What characteristics of surface morainesprove this fact?
Few traces of drumlins, kames, or terminal moraines are found upon the Kansan drift, and where thick enough to mask the preexisting surface, it seems to have been spread originally in level plains of till.
The valley glaciers which unite and spread to form this lake of ice lie above the snow line and their moraines are concealed beneath neve.
Lakelets may occupy hollows excavated in solid rock, and other lakes may be held behind terminal moraines left as dams across the valley at pauses in the retreat of the glacier.
Behind the terminal moraines lie wide till plains, in places studded thickly with drumlins, or ridged with an occasional esker.
Surface moraines appear in the lower course of the glacier as ridges, which may reach the exceptional height of one hundred feet.
The unstratified portion of the drift consists chiefly of sheets of dense, stony clay called till, which clearly are the groundmoraines of ancient continental glaciers.
Did the ice fields of the Glacial epoch bear heavy surface moraines like the medial and lateralmoraines of valley glaciers?
These Permian ground moraines are not the first traces of the work of glaciers met with in the geological record.
The moving floor of ice stretched high across a valley sweeps along as lateral moraines much of the waste which a mountain stream would let accumulate in talus and alluvial cones.
Outwash plains are plains of sand and gravel which frequently border terminal moraines on their outward face, and were spread evidently by outwash from the melting ice.
Each branch thus adds a medial moraine, and by counting the number of medial moraines of a trunk stream one may learn of how many branches it is composed.
Wind and water have done an enormous amount of work sorting out the soil in moraines and, leaving the boulders behind, this soil was scattered and sifted far and wide to feed the hungry plant-life.
Many of these terminal moraines are an array of broken embankments, small basin-like holes and smooth, level spaces.
In the Rocky Mountains most of the forests are growing in soil or moraines that were ground and distributed by glaciers.
But as night begins to approach, the listening hunter will hear the rattling of stones upon the morainesabove the glacier.
From this it is evident, also, that when the ice began to retreat, the retreat was so continuous and rapid that no parallel terminal moraines were formed for many miles.
One of the ancient moraines contains a boulder from thirty to forty feet in diameter, and the amount of glacial débris covering the mountain-sides is said to be enormous.
The terminal moraines of ancient glaciers may often be traced by the relative abundance of these kettle-holes.
An interesting series ofmoraines in the north of Germany, bordering the Baltic Sea, was discovered in 1888 by Professor Salisbury, of the United States Geological Survey.
The movement of the Cordilleran glaciers extended northwest to a distance of three hundred and fifty miles, leaving their moraines far down in the Yukon Valley on the Lewes and Pelly Rivers.
Nine medial moraines marked the continued course of as many main branches, which becoming united formed the grand trunk of the glacier.
It comes down from an unknown distance in the western interior, bearing two marked medial moraines upon its surface.
Geikie, and the moraines in Britain and Germany according to Lewis and Salisbury.
Gravel Terminal moraines marking and sand deposits from pauses or readvance englacial drift in during general retreat of Delaware and Susquehanna ice.
In connexion with almost all the Himalayan glaciers of which precise accounts are forthcoming are ancient moraines indicating some previous condition in which their extent was much larger than now.
In the east these moraines are very remarkable, extending 8 or 10 m.
In these moraines we had very steep slopes to ascend and descend; in one case the descent was so sharp that for safety we all dismounted and led our ponies down the side, at each step sending down a shower of stones and pebbles.
On nearing Thjofadal we emerged from the lava and entered upon the moraines at the foot of the range bordering the great ice-field of Lang Joekull.
A succession of moraines brought us to the banks of a broad river, the Blanda, having several channels and a reputation for quicksands.
The screes were formed of rough angular blocks with very little soil between them, and the poppy was only growing in the most barren spots; where moraines occurred the poppy did not grow.
Along these moraines we went until reaching the slopes of Efriskutur, up which we rode to the summit.
Much of the debris in the vast Boulderfield and Mills Moraines and a lesser amount from the enormous Bierstadt and St. Vrain Moraines must have come from the summit slope of the Long's Peak group.
Many an evening after a day with the moraines and the forests, or with the eagles and the crags, I have gone down to one of these ideal camping-places.
Bierstadt, St. Vrain, and Mills Moraines are imposing deposits of glacial debris.
In slide rock and in bouldery moraines up as high as thirteen thousand feet, one finds the pika, or cony.
The Columbia winds almost at its foot, and a multitude of lakes, dammed by glacial moraines and lava dikes, nestle in its shadow.
Note the huge terminal moraines built by these glaciers in their retreat.
None of the lateral moraines extends more than two or three hundred yards below the snout of its glacier.
These extend half a mile below its present snout, and the inner moraines are underlaid with ice, showing the retreat has been recent.
Like the other Mount Adams glaciers, and indeed nearly all glaciers in the northern hemisphere, it is shrinking, and has built severalmoraines on each side.
This, with the resulting shrinkage in the glaciers, is shown by the high lateral moraines left as the width of the ice streams has lessened.
The climbers found evidence of recent activity in two craters on the north slope, and photographed a curious "diagonal moraine," as regular in shape as a railway embankment, which connected the border moraines of a small glacier.
The larger moraines stand fifty to a hundred feet above the present ice-streams, thus indicating the former glacier levels.
Illustration: Lower end of Eliot glacier, seen from Cooper Spur, and showing the lateral moraines which this receding glacier has built in recent years.
On both sides are rough moorland, with morainesof ancient glaciers.
This tarn is in a hollow on the side of one of the moraines of ancient glaciers which hereabouts flank the highroad.
This is the series of lateral moraines that lie between Loch Ewe and Loch Gruinard, more or less parallel to their coasts.
Geologists differ about their origin; they look like moraines of ancient glaciers or ancient sea-banks, broken through by the now small river from Loch Rosque, which must have had larger volume at some remote date.
These are the lateral moraines of the huge glaciers that pushed their resistless march from the mountains above out to sea.
The true equivalent in this country of the upper diluvium is not our upper boulder-clay, but the great valley-moraines of our mountain-regions.
In short, three separate and distinct ground-moraines are recognised.
The evidence for these is quite conspicuous, for the moraines are found resting on the surface of post-glacial beaches.
The kames of Wisconsin again and again reminded me of the gravelly moraines that cover the ground for many miles round the lower end of Lake Garda.
Not infrequently, indeed, we find one set of moraines superposed upon another, just as in the low-grounds of northern Germany, etc.
The geographical distribution of the upper diluvium and the position of large terminal moraines put this quite beyond doubt.
Swiss geologists are agreed that the ground-moraines which clothe the bottoms of the great Alpine valleys, and extend outwards sometimes for many miles upon the low-grounds beyond, are of true glacial origin.
Many of the small moraines that occur at the heads of our mountain-valleys, both in the Highlands and Southern Uplands, belong in all probability to this epoch.
That glaciers should accumulate terminal moraines is axiomatic, but no geologist before 1868 had ventured to suggest where moraines might be located in the United States.
At the lower ends of the great Italian lakes, such as Maggiore, Como, Garda, and others, there are vast moraines which are proved by their contents to have come from the upper Alpine valleys above the lakes.
The distinct character of the drift in the two cases is such as it would be if two colossal glaciers should now come down from the higher Alps through the valleys traversed by those rivers, leaving their moraines in the low country.
From F, as from a great vomitory, it then radiated in all directions bearing along with it the moraines with which it was loaded and spreading them out on all sides over the great plain.
Each of these groups of detritus is observed (see map, Figure 43) to contain exclusively the wreck of such rocks as occur in situ on the Alpine heights of the hydrographical basins to which the moraines respectively belong.
Guyot's views, I crossed to the Italian side of the great chain and became convinced that the same theory was equally applicable to the ancient moraines of the plains of the Po.
All minor ridges and valleys are levelled and concealed, but here and there steep mountains protrude abruptly from the icy slope, and a few superficial lines of stones or moraines are visible at seasons when no recent snow has fallen.
That of the Rhone, for example, did not again reach the Jura, though it filled the Lake of Geneva and formed enormous moraines on its borders and in many parts of the valley between the Alps and Jura.
The moraines of glaciers are always from the first devoid of shells, and if transported by ice-bergs to a distance, and deposited where the ice melts, may continue as barren of every indication of life as they were when they originated.
Among other signs of the last retreat of the extinct glaciers, Kjerulf and other authors describe large transverse moraines left in many of the Norwegian and Swedish glens.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "moraines" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
