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. Outwash plains are sometimes pitted by bowl-shaped basins where ice blocks were left buried in the sand by the retreating glacier.
Valley trains are deposits of stratified drift with which river valleys have been aggraded. Valleys leading outward from the ice front were flooded by glacial waters and were filled often to great depths with trains of stream-swept drift. Since the disappearance of the ice these glacial flood plains have been dissected by the shrunken rivers of recent times and left on either side the valley in high terraces. Valley trains head in morainic plains, and their material grows finer down valley and coarser toward their sources. Their gradient is commonly greater than that of the present rivers.
The extent of the drift. The extent of the drift of North America and its southern limits are best seen in [Figure 359]. Its area is reckoned at about four million square miles. The ice fields which once covered so much of our continent were all together ten times as large as the inland ice of Greenland, and about equal to the enormous ice cap which now covers the antartic regions.
The ice field of Europe was much smaller, measuring about seven hundred and seventy thousand square miles.
Centers of dispersion. The direction of the movement of the ice is recorded plainly in the scorings of the rock surface, in the shapes of glaciated hills, in the axes of drumlins and eskers, and in trains of bowlders, when the ledges from which they were plucked can be discovered. In these ways it has been proved that in North America there were three centers where ice gathered to the greatest depth, and from which it flowed in all directions outward. There were thus three vast ice fields,—one the Cordilleran, which lay upon the Cordilleras of British America; one the Keewatin, which flowed out from the province of Keewatin, west of Hudson Bay; and one the Labrador ice field, whose center of dispersion was on the highlands of the peninsula of Labrador. As shown in [Figure 359], the western ice field extended but a short way beyond the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where perhaps it met the far-traveled ice from the great central field. The Keewatin and the Labrador ice fields flowed farthest toward the south, and in the Mississippi valley the one reached the mouth of the Missouri and the other nearly to the mouth of the Ohio. In Minnesota and Wisconsin and northward they merged in one vast field.
Fig. 359. Hypothetical Map of the Pleistocene Ice Sheets of North America
From Salisbury’s Glacial Geology of New Jersey