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Glacier
MAKING A NATIONAL PARK
 ICEBERG LAKE WHERE FLOES DRIFT IN AUGUST Photograph by Ellis Prentice Cole |
HOW nature, just how many millions of years ago no man can estimate, made the Glacier National Park is a stirring story. Once this whole region was covered with the prehistoric sea. The earthy sediments deposited by this water hardened into rocky strata. If you were in the park to-day you would see broad horizontal streaks of variously colored rock in the mountain masses thousands of feet above you. They are discernible in the photographs in this book. They are the very strata that the waters deposited in their depths in those far-away ages. How they got from the seas' bottoms to the mountains' tops is the story.
In the settling of the earth's masses into their present shape, mountain ranges have arisen from the sea by internal pressures. Just as the squeezed orange bulges in places, so this region was forced upward. Then it cracked and the westem edge of the earth's skin was thrust far over the eastern edge.
The edge thus thrust over was many thousands of feet thick and disclosed all the geological strata which had been deposited at that time. In the many centuries of centuries since ali these strata have been washed away except the bottom layer of the overthrust skin. The rock thus disclosed is at least eighty millions of years old. It is the same rock as the Grand Canyon. Glacier National Park is the Canadian Rockies done in Grand Canyon colors. Frost and rains and glaciers have marvelously carved it.
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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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