Fig. 112. A Glaciated Hill, Norway.
Sharp Weathered Mountain Peaks in the Distance
Cirques. Valley glaciers commonly head as we have seen, in broad amphitheaters deeply filled with snow and ice. On mountains now destitute of glaciers, but whose glaciation shows that they have supported glaciers in the past, there are found similar crescentic hollows with high, precipitous walls and glaciated floors. Their floors are often basined and hold lakelets whose deep and quiet waters reflect the sheltering ramparts of rugged rock which tower far above them. Such mountain hollows are termed cirques. As a powerful spring wears back a recess in the valley side where it discharges, so the fountain head of a glacier gradually wears back a cirque. In its slow movement the névé field broadly scours its bed to a flat or basined floor. Meanwhile the sides of the valley head are steepened and driven back to precipitous walls. For in winter the crevasse of the bergschrund which surrounds the névé field is filled with snow and the névé is frozen fast to the rocky sides of the valley. In early summer the névé tears itself free, dislodging and removing any loosened blocks, and the open fissure of the bergschrund allows frost and other agencies of weathering to attack the unprotected rock. As cirques are thus formed and enlarged the peaks beneath which they lie are sharpened, and the mountain crests are scalloped and cut back from either side to knife-edged ridges (Figs. [113] and [93]).
Fig. 113. Cirques, Sierra Nevada Mountains
In the western mountains of the United States many cirques, now empty of névé and glacier ice, and known locally as “basins,” testify to the fact that in recent times the snow line stood beneath the levels of their floors, and thus far below its present altitude.
