The Delaware River above the "Forks," at the mouth of the Lehigh,
breaks through a narrow notch in the Chestnut Hill ridge known as the
"Little Water Gap," while farther to the northeast the ridge continues
through New Jersey as the Jenny Jump Mountain. Above this is the noted
"Foul Rift," where the river channel is filled with boulders and rocks
of all sizes and shapes, the dread of the raftsmen who gave it the
name, for many a raft has been wrecked there. But while this place is
shunned by the navigator, it has an absorbing attraction for the
geologist. This was where the great "Terminal Moraine" of the glacial
epoch crossed the Delaware, recalling the "Ice Age," to which
reference has already been made. When the vast Greenland ice-cap crept
down so as to overspread northeastern America and northwestern Europe
and filled the intervening Atlantic bed, it broke off many rocky
fragments in its southward advance, scratching the surfaces of the
ledges, and the fragments held in its grip, with striated lines and
grooves in the direction of its movement. The ice steadily flowed
southward, coming over mountain and valley alike in a continuous
sheet, enveloping the ocean and adjacent continents, and finally
halted on the Delaware about sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Its
southern verge spread across America from Alaska to St. Louis, and
thence to the Atlantic on the northern coast of New Jersey. Its
southern boundary entered Western Pennsylvania near Beaver, passing
northeast to the New York line; then turning southeast, it crossed the
Lehigh about ten miles northwest of Mauch Chunk and the Delaware just
below Belvidere. It crossed New Jersey to Staten Island, traversed the
length of Long Island, and passed out to sea, appearing on Block
Island, Cape Cod, St. George's Bank and Sable Island Shoal, south of
Nova Scotia. The boundary of the glacier west of the "Foul Rift" on
the Delaware appears as a range of low gravel hills, which are piled
upon the slate hills of Northampton farther west, and reach the base
of the Blue Ridge three miles east of the "Wind Gap." The boundary
here mounted and crossed the Kittatinny ridge sixteen hundred feet
high, being well shown upon its summit, and then passed over the
intervening valley to the Broad Mountain or Pocono range. The Delaware
at the "Foul Rift" is elevated two hundred and fifty feet above tide;
and where the glacier boundary crossed the mountains in the interior
it was at about twenty-six hundred feet elevation on the highest land
in Potter County, the Continental watershed.
This vast glacier was so thick as to overtop even Mount Washington,
for it dropped transported boulders on the summit of that highest peak
in New England. Its southern edge in Pennsylvania was at least eight
hundred feet thick in solid ice. A hundred miles back among the
Catskills it was thirty-one hundred feet thick, and two hundred miles
back in northern New England it was five thousand to six thousand feet
thick, being still thicker farther northward. The Pocono Knob, near
Stroudsburg, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, out-topped the glacier, and
jutted out almost like an island surrounded by ice. The late Professor
H. Carvill Lewis, who closely studied this glacier, has described how,
all over the country which it covered, it dropped what is known as the
"northern drift," or "till," or "hardpan," in scattered deposits of
stones, clay, gravel and _débris_ of all kinds, brought down from the
northward as the ice moved along, and irregularly dumped upon the
surface, thickly in some places and thinly in others, with many
boulders, some of enormous size. It abraded all the rock surfaces
crossed, and transported and rounded and striated the fragments torn
off in its resistless passage. The line of farthest southern advance
of the ice is shown by the "Terminal Moraine," stretching across
country, which put the obstructions into the "Foul Rift." A glacier
always pushes up at its foot a mound of material composed of fragments
of rocks of all shapes and sizes, which the ice has taken up at
various points along its flow and carried to its terminus, thus
forming the moraine. This "Terminal Moraine" has been traced and
carefully studied for four hundred miles across Pennsylvania, showing
throughout a remarkable accumulation of drift materials and boulders,
heaped into irregular hills and hollows over a strip of land nearly a
mile wide. The action of the Delaware River currents at the "Foul
Rift" has washed out the finer materials and cobblestones, leaving
only the larger boulders and rocks to perplex the navigator.
Some of the performances of this great glacier in the region adjacent
to the Delaware are remarkable. It has carried huge granite boulders
from the far north and planted them all along the summit of the
Kittatinny where it crossed. It has torn out big pieces of limestone,
some of them thirty feet long, from their beds in Monroe County, north
of this range, carried them in the ice more than a thousand feet up
its steep northern face and over the summit, finally dropping them on
the south side in the moraine in the slate valley of Northampton.
These immense limestone rocks made comparatively short journeys, but
one ponderous boulder of syenite from the Adirondacks was found in
Northampton, well rounded and dressed, having travelled in the ice at
least two hundred miles. There has also been found a "glacial groove"
upon the rocks of the Kittatinny near the Water Gap, where some
ponderous fragment, imbedded in the ice, as it moved along has gouged
out a great scratch six feet wide and seventy feet in length. Although
this ice had evidently resistless power in its slow motion, yet it
seems to have had small influence upon the topography of the country.
It appears to have merely "sand-papered" the surfaces of the rocks. It
passed bodily across the sharp edges of the upright sandstone strata
of the Kittatinny, yet has not had appreciable effect in cutting the
ridge down, the glaciated portion east of the "Wind Gap" appearing as
high and as sharply defined as the unglaciated part to the westward of
the moraine. The glacier made many lakes north of the moraine, due to
the "kettle holes" and obstruction of streams by unequal deposits of
drift. It is inferred in the estimates of the duration of the glacier,
from astronomical data, that the cold period began two hundred and
eighty thousand years ago, the greatest cold being many thousand years
later. The intense cold began moderating eighty thousand years ago,
but the sea of ice remained long afterwards, and steadily diminished
under the increasing heat. So many thousand years being required for
melting, there are data inducing the belief that the ice-cap did not
retreat from this part of the country back to Greenland until within
ten thousand or fifteen thousand years ago. Then came the floods of
water from the melting glacier, and it is significant that the Indians
in the spacious valley northwest of the Kittatinny called that fertile
region the "Minisink," meaning "the waters have gone," indicating
their legendary memory of the floods following the melting and retreat
of the glacier and the final outflow of its waters.