CGRG Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology
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Author : Brookes, I.A.
Date : 2001.
Title : Do you get my drift?: George Mercer Dawson's Canada.
Publication : Canadian Quaternary Association/ Association canadienne pour l'etude du Quaternaire, Annual Meeting 2001. Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, August 20 – 24, 2001.
Issue :
Page(s) :
Abstract
G. M. Dawson's late 19th Century glacial reconstructions in the Canadian Cordillera and Interior Plains are reviewed in light of the contemporary intellectual climate. Two questions are raised, which, curiously, escaped Dawson, as well as contemporary objectors, even modern appraisals. Question One asks why icebergs drifted westward across the "Glacial Sea" from the "great confluent glacier" on the "Laurentian Axis" to the foot of the Rockies, against a W-E atmospheric circulation that Dawson invoked to grow the Cordilleran Glacier? Question Two asks how icebergs collected debris from the sea-floor, which they were supposed to deposit "down-drift." This is a general query as well as applying to Dawson's Cordilleran "boulder-clay" and, west of the Coteau, to his Cretaceous-rich drift, derived from Cretaceous bedrock. Bergs could not have deposited this latter drift, neither could floe-ice, since Laurentian erratics at the surface, "dropped from icebergs," would have been buried by floe-ice drift during marine regression. Dawson's grand schemes for the Cordillera and the Plains appeared late in the day, and raised little comment. They were immediately overtaken by rapidly widening (though much delayed) acceptance of the Glacier Theory. R.A. Bell, for instance, championed Canadian glaciation in the same year as Dawson's Cordilleran synthesis (1890), while Chamberlin (1894) applied Dawson's term "Laurentide" to the now-familiar sub-continental ice-sheet, sweeping Dawson aside.
Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology