Page:1880. A Tramp Abroad.djvu/482

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462
IMMENSE SIZE OF GLACIERS.

their showers of rocks and stones, in witness of which there are the immense piles of angular fragments that constitute the moraines of Ivria.

FRONT OF GLACIER.

"The moraines around Ivria are of extraordinary dimensions. That which was on the left bank of the glacier is about thirteen miles long, and in some places rises to a height of two thousand one hundred and thirty feet above the floor of the valley! The terminal moraines (those which are pushed in front of the glaciers), cover something like twenty square miles of country. At the mouth of the Valley of the Aosta, the thickness of the glacier must have been at least two thousand feet, and its width, at that part, five miles and a quarter."

It is not easy to get at a comprehension of a mass of ice like that. If one could cleave off the butt end of such a glacier—an oblong block two or three miles wide by five and a