mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Controversy about the Glacial Theory Contents * Louis Agassiz * Sir J. W. Dawson's Dissent from the Glacial Theory * Raphael Pumpelly on secular rock disintegration * The Anti-Glacialists * Devil's Monument * Curious Holes at the Top of the Niagara Escarpment * Mystery of Pothole Origins * Peculiar Potholes at Lion's Head * Pebble Within a Boulder * A Discussion about the Glacial Theory * Properties of Ice * Articles * Problems in the Glacial Theory * Theories of the Ice Age * Drumlins and Diluvial Currents * Drumlins and subglacial meltwater floods John Shaw Responds Origin of the Great Lakes Giant Current Ripples in Ontario's Bruce Peninsula Directional Erosion Evidence in Lake Huron Catastrophic Flood Dynamic Database Flood Evidence in Eastern Washington Michigan's Fossil Whales The Mammoth and the Flood Related Links _________________________________________________________________ Louis Agassiz Louis Agassiz, 1807-73, of Fribourg, Switzerland, was the leading advocate of the Glacial Theory. In 1831 he went to Paris to study a collection of fossils under the guidance of G. Cuvier. In 1832 he became professor of natural history at the University of Neuchatel. His important researches on fossil fishes were published 1833-44. In order to demonstrate the motion of glaciers, Agassiz built a hut on a glacier and with the help of his students, mapped its movements. In 1840 he published his observations on glacier movements, and his theory of the glacial origin of the drift gravels. Agassiz visited the United States in 1846, and in 1848 accepted a professorship of zoology and geology at Harvard. He used the facts of embryology to help develop a system of classification of animals. Throughout his life, Agassiz insisted that the laws of embryonic development (ontogeny) are also the laws of geological succession (phylogeny). In his Essay on Classification, written in 1851, he wrote: ... the phenomena of animal life correspond to one another, whether we compare their rank as determined by structural complication with the phases of their growth, or with their succession in past geological ages... Charles Darwin considered this doctrine of Agassiz to be support for his theory of evolution by natural selection. However, Agassiz vigorously opposed Darwin's theory, believing that new species could arise only through the intervention of God. Agassiz statue-[agassizt.jpg] This statue of Louis Agassiz was toppled from its niche above the arches at Stanford University by the San Francisco, California earthquake, Apr. 18, 1906, magnitude 8.3. The photograph was taken by J. C. Branner. Louis Agassiz A biography. Geology and the Recapitulation Theory A Brief Overview of Glaciology has information on Agassiz and the history of the glacial theory. From the Mosaic Deluge to the Ice Age or How the Glacial Theory was Accepted, by Heikki Rainio gives an account of the early history of the glacial theory in Finland. Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ J. W. Dawson on the Glacial Theory J. William Dawson (1820-1899) was one of the last great geologists of the nineteenth century who opposed the glacial theory of Louis Agassiz. Dawson was born and educated at Pictou, Nova Scotia, and became interested in geology and collected fossil plants from the local coal seams. He studied at Edinburgh in 1840-41, where he formed friendships with geologists such as Charles Lyell and William Logel. Logel later became the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada. During an unsuccessul bid for the chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh in 1854, Dawson was offered the job of Principal at McGill University in Montreal, which he accepted. At first he taught almost all the science courses. By his leadership in applying science to commerce and industry McGill was established as one of Canada's most innovative scientific centers of learning. Dawson published several popular discussions of the relation between science and religion. A devout Christian and a creationist, Dawson was a vigorous opponent of Darwinism. He served as the first president of the Royal Society of Canada in 1882, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1882-3), president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1886), and was a fellow of several other learned societies. He was knighted in 1884. Dawson attributed the drift gravels and boulder clays to the work of drifting icebergs which transported and deposited drift material during a long period of subsidence of the land, and he opposed the glacial theory of Louis Agassiz. The reasons for his rejection of the theory of glaciation or an Ice Age, from the Fourth Edition of Acadian Geology, are presented in: Sir J. W. Dawson's Dissent from the Glacial Theory Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ Devil's Monument Devil's Pulpit The Niagara Escarpment represents a "driftless area" in Southern Ontario, where the rock outcrops and landforms are exposed. This presents a serious problem for the conventional idea of glaciation, as the escarpment would obviously have formed an immense barrier to the alleged motion of the former ice sheets over it. Ice would need to have moved from the lower side to the higher, climbing uphill over the long line of very steep cliffs, and many features of the escarpment do not seem to support the notion of this strange postulated movement of ice sheets. In some areas, for example, the hard dolomite rock is disintegrated, and shattered into small blocks, that remain precariously piled in position as unstable crags such as the stack known as the "Devil's Pulpit", illustrated in the photo at left. It is located along the western shoreline of Georgian Bay on the Bruce Peninsula, where the escarpment drops away steeply into the lake to a depth of several hundred feet, and it is in a position that probably would have received maximum wear and tear from the motion of any former ice sheet over it. Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ Curious Holes at the Top of the Niagara Escarpment [neholes.gif]-[neholes.gif] Click on the image at right for a photo [jpeg, 36 kbytes] of some large holes found at the top of the Niagara Escarpment near Milton, Ontario, prior to quarrying. These holes were discovered as the surface drift material was removed; they were previously filled up with loose earthy material, including the boulders shown lying at the bottom. Notice the slabs of dolomitic limestone that slope towards the holes. The bright rock surfaces exposed when drift was removed were smooth, with abundant scratches or striations. In the in situ disintegration theory, the scratches probably formed during movements of the surface drift material generated by expansion effects as the drift formed during the erosion of overburden. Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ Pebble Within a Boulder Rounded dolomite pebble within a boulder The photo at left shows a rounded pebble of dolomite within another larger boulder, also rounded, from a gravel deposit in Cambridge, Ontario. How would this be explained in the glacial theory? Was the larger boulder indented by the small pebble? Scottish glacialist James Geikie suggested this kind of thing must have occurred, to explain indented boulders he had observed in the drift. He attributed this to the immense pressure of the ice on rock. But how could this occur, without either the pebble or the boulder becoming crushed? In the disintegration theory, the rounded pebbles and boulders of the drift were formed by concretionary processes; there was chemical segregation of component minerals into the concretionary centers as sediments were lithified, and upon disintegration, these concretions became boulders and pebbles. Thus there are often smaller concretions within the boulders and pebbles of the drift. Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ A Discussion about the Glacial Theory These text files contain a series of posts from a talk.origins discussion on the Glacial Theory. * Re: Glaciers, 18 March 1996 * Re: Glaciers, 24 March 1996 * Re: Glaciers, 26 March 1996 (a) * Re: Glaciers, 26 March 1996 (b) * Re: Glaciers, 28 March 1996 Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ The Great Lakes Map of the lower Great Lakes area Map showing the lower Great Lakes area. The rock basins of the Great Lakes, and the Finger Lakes of New York, and thousands of other deep lake basins in the Canadian Shield could not have been excavated by ice. The depths reached by some of these rock basins is too great, and the volume of drift south of the Great Lakes is less than the volume of material that would need to be excavated. Former glaciers or hypothetical ice sheets could carry eroded material no further than the perimeter of the ice. Where did it all go? For example, south of Lake Michigan, in the Chigago area, there is bedrock near the surface and there are no moraine mountains composed of drift along the alleged perimeter of the hypothetical ice sheet. This is also true in Ohio and most other areas south of the lakes. Patterns of drumlins, which are streamlined landforms formed by current flow, show the direction of the former currents generated by crustal warping in the area of the Great Lakes at the end of the flood. The land was tilted upwards north and east of the lakes, spilling the waters to the south and west. In the area south of Lake Ontario, currents flowed towards the south, forming patterns of drumlins in New York. The drumlins are the effects of streamlining due to fast currents; ice does not move fast enough to cause streamlining. In the uplands of western New York, the drumlins at higher elevations tend to be longer, and have steeper sides, with narrow crests. This shows they were caused by water currents, and not ice movement, as an ice sheet being pushed uphill cannot move any faster than the ice to the rear, that is causing the push! But water currents increase in velocity at shallower depths, by the principle of continuity. After the New York drumlins formed, there was uplift east of Lake Ontario, centered in the Adirondack region, that spilled the floodwaters to the west. The patterns of drumlins in the Niagara Peninsula and the surrounding areas fan out in different directions. In Ontario the flow was to the northwest. This is very hard to explain by invoking a great ice sheet centered somewhere towards the north. In the area to the southwest there was flow to the southwest. Lake Erie was probably excavated by the same currents that formed these drumlin fields, and the material from the lake basin was carried far to the south and redeposited, perhaps in the continental shelves. The flood theory suggests these currents shaped unconsolidated sediment, or partly consolidated sediment, that was subsequently lithified. The disintegration penetrated to various depths, so that some drumlins remained berock, some had a mantle of drift, and some were composed of drift materials. All these types may have the same form and orientation, so were all formed by the same process of streamlining. Along the shores of Lake Ontario there are many drumlins that were cut in half by the currents that excavated the lake basin. This shows the sequence of events; and the environment in which all these effects were produced. The excavation of the rock basins of the lakes, especially in the case of Lake Superior, deepest of the Great Lakes, was likely aided by disintegration. As erosion occurred, the process penetrated to greater depths, and the disintegration product was removed by the rapid currents. All this must have happened only thousands of years ago; this is evident because of the generally good preservation of the drumlins composed of stratified drift. The lake basins would be filled up, and drift landforms would disappear, over an immense period of time. The ancient shorelines in the Great Lakes area and in the eastern part of North America also support this interpretation. They are generally higher to the northeast, and are not horizontal; they show that crustal warping was involved. The overall structure of the region is determined by the Michigan Basin, a downwarping of the granite basement some 10,000 feet deep in central Michigan. The patterns of drumlins conform with the tilting indicated by the ancient shorelines, and with the dip of the bedrock in the Great Lakes region. For more information, see: Origin of the Great Lakes See also: Drumlins and subglacial meltwater floods Giant Current Ripples in Ontario's Bruce Peninsula Directional Erosion Evidence in Lake Huron Flood Evidence in Eastern Washington Michigan's Fossil Whales The Mammoth and the Flood Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ Related Links * Drumlin photos * A swarm of drumlins * Aerial view of drumlins in east-central Wisconsin * Internal structure of a drumlin * Cross section through a drumlin at Galway, western Ireland Drumlins May Record Catastrophic Floods. Glacial Grooves, Kellys Island Ohio, by Hollianne Holmes. [erie1.jpg]-[erie1.jpg] Map showing the location of Kellys Island. * Canadian Landscapes * Map of drumlin distributions in western New York * Report on the 5th International Drumlin Symposium by Jan A. Piotrowski. After 130 years of investigation by glacial theorists, still no consensus. * An essay on Drumlins by Josi Hauschild. * Letters to "Nature" on the Glacial Origin of Alpine Lakes (1893-1894), Alfred Russel Wallace * Glacial Age Floods in the Mississippi valley. * Great Lakes Bathymetry Maps. * Landform map showing Lake Ontario and New York State from Ray Sterner's Color Landform Atlas of the United States. * The Mammoth Saga * When the Earth Nearly Died * Geomorfologia dynamiczna / Dynamic geomorphology Return to Contents _________________________________________________________________ © Copyright 1996 by Douglas E. Cox All Rights Reserved. Return to The Creation Concept general link: http://www/sentex.net/~tcc/index.html