The next interesting feature of glaciated regions is the occurrence of those curious mountain forms which have special names in nearly every recently-glaciated region. Those gigantic arm-chair-shaped notches, high up on the mountain sides, which the Welsh call cwms, the Scotch corries, the French cirques, and the Germans kare, are very widespread in the Highlands of Scotland, in the mountains of Wales, in the Tyrol, and in other parts of the Alps (though they are not common in the Central region), and in North America as well as elsewhere.
A cirque ([fig. 8]) is shaped something like an office arm-chair. The floor has only a gentle downward slope, and often lodges a lake; or in other cases it is marshy, showing that a lake was once present. The back and sides are steep and precipitous. 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. Very often, as one may easily see in the Highlands of Scotland, a series of cirques occur, one above the other, so that a climber proceeding from the valley floor upwards has a succession of steep “pitches,” to use a mountaineering term, alternating with easy if wet walks across the floors of the successive cirques.
Fig. 8.—Diagram showing two glacial cirques.
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.
In other cases, again, we may find that what should be the flat floor of the cirque has been largely eaten away, as it were, by a huge rounded trough, which occupies what would be the extreme front of the seat of the arm-chair. In this trough a stream runs, and the trough has the characteristic U-shaped rounding characteristic of glacial forms. Further, at the top of the wall of the trough a bench or shelf exists, which is obviously the remains of the old cirque floor. In the case of all characteristic glacial cirques, however, the special feature is that the flat bottom of the cirque is discontinuous with the valley below; they are not parts of the same system of drainage. What we may call an unconformity appears between the two regions, more or less marked according as running water has or has not had time to begin the work of the removal of the unconformity.
The immediate human importance of these corries or cirques is not so apparent as in the case of hanging valleys, but they must be mentioned, if only because of their extraordinary abundance in glaciated regions, and especially in Great Britain. There are two views as to their origin, and we shall indicate both here without making any attempt to decide which is the correct one. A very full and clear statement of one position will be found in an article by Prof. Garwood in the Geographical Journal for September 1910, while previous articles by Prof. Davis and others in this journal formulate the opposed view.
To the first school the corrie is simply in origin the collecting basin of a pre-glacial stream, such a basin tending to acquire, roughly speaking, a flattish bottom and somewhat steep sides. With the onset of the ice the floor of the basin was protected by the ice from further erosion, while the frost ate back the wall and so steepened it, and the glacier carried away all débris as it formed. At a later stage the lower part of the glacier disappeared and only the cirque glacier was left. It continued its protective action, while below the powerful torrents hollowed out a trough. This process was perhaps repeated several times, with the final result that the protected cirque was left as a much-modified remnant of pre-glacial conditions, while the valley below was powerfully eroded by the glacial torrents. Thus a cirque lying above an existing valley is to be regarded as the beheaded end of an old valley, preserved by its ice covering, while below the old valley has been fundamentally modified by the scour of the glacial torrents. On this view the sharp distinction between the two angles of slope marks the distinction between the work of ice (protective) and the work of water (erosive). A series of cirques means a succession of glacial and interglacial periods.