Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 51

breaking up the forests, and overwhelming the trunks and branches of the trees in its masses of débris.

Let us turn to the next question: Was it an extraordinary event, a world-shaking cataclysm ?

The answer to this question is plain: The Drift marks probably the most awful convulsion and catastrophe that has ever fallen upon the globe. The deposit of these continental masses of clay, sand, and gravel was but one of the features of the apalling event. In addition to this the earth at the same time was cleft with great cracks or fissures, which reached down through many miles of the planet’s crust to the central fires and released the boiling rocks imprisoned in its bosom, and these poured to the surface, as igneous, intrusive, or trap-rocks. Where the great breaks were not deep enough to reach the central fires, they left mighty fissures in the surface, which, in the Scandinavian regions, are known as fiords, and which constitute a striking feature of the scenery of these northern lands ; they are great canals—hewn, as it were, in the rock—with high walls penetrating from the sea far into the interior of the land. They are found in Great Britain, Maine, Noya Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, and on the Western coast of North America.

Dayid Dale Owen tells us that the outburst of traprock at the Dalles of the St. Croix came up through open Jissures, breaking the continuity of strata, without tilting them into inclined planes.”* It would appear as if the earth, in the first place, cracked into deep clefts, and the igneous matter within took advantage of these breaks to rise to the surface. It caught masses of the sandstone in its midst and hardened around them.

These great clefts seem to be, as Owen says, “lines

* “ Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota,” p. 142.