Instead Of
A Stream Of Ice Winding Down A Mountain-Walled Valley Like The
Largest Of The Swiss Glaciers, The Muir Looks Like A Broad Undulating
Prairie Streaked With Medial Moraines And Gashed With Crevasses,
Surrounded By Numberless Mountains From Which Flow Its Many Tributary
Glaciers.
There are seven main tributaries from ten to twenty miles
long and from two to six miles wide where
They enter the trunk, each
of them fed by many secondary tributaries; so that the whole number
of branches, great and small, pouring from the mountain fountains
perhaps number upward of two hundred, not counting the smallest. The
area drained by this one grand glacier can hardly be less than seven
or eight hundred miles, and probably contains as much ice as all the
eleven hundred Swiss glaciers combined. Its length from the frontal
wall back to the head of its farthest fountain seemed to be about
forty or fifty miles, and the width just below the confluence of the
main tributaries about twenty-five miles. Though apparently
motionless as the mountains, it flows on forever, the speed varying
in every part with the seasons, but mostly with the depth of the
current, and the declivity, smoothness and directness of the
different portions of the basin. The flow of the central cascading
portion near the front, as determined by Professor Reid, is at the
rate of from two and a half to five inches an hour, or from five to
ten feet a day. A strip of the main trunk about a mile in width,
extending along the eastern margin about fourteen miles to a lake
filled with bergs, has so little motion and is so little interrupted
by crevasses, a hundred horsemen might ride abreast over it without
encountering very much difficulty.
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