Ancient Places Read Online Free
Author: Jack Nisbet
busy with the fish, he wandered off, tracing the edge of a stony outcrop. After a while he felt a breath of cool breeze seeping froma crack. Squeezing between two rocks, he found himself inside a cave. There he saw big icicles hanging down. He recalled touching the cold daggers and feeling the magic that made them grow. He broke one off and licked it: the first Popsicle he ever had.
“Just like here,” his niece said, leaning her head into the cool flow of air. “If we could crawl down into this hole, there would be Popsicles waiting for us.”
Many early newspapers and oral traditions throughout the Northwest contained reports about“ice caves,” “ice wells,” “ice tunnels,” “old ice,” and “blue ice” that mirrored the conditions of the odd vents in Spokane. In the days before electricity, such features were commonly used for refrigeration. In the town of Thompson Falls, Montana, on the Clark Fork River, early white settlers discovered that their basements often tapped into“cold air wells” that were perfect for preserving meat and produce. When a 1950s-era dam across Cabinet Gorge raised the water table upstream, it changed the dynamics of those drafty basements, and many old-timers were forced to purchase their first refrigerators. As recently as the 1980s, a road crew widening the state highway in the vicinity uncovered chunks of “ground ice” while removing rock from the base of surrounding outcrops. At the time, some reporters of the discovery wondered if the frozen blocks might be ancient ice left behind in the wake of the last glaciers.
Wondering whether all these accounts might be related, I contacted Idaho geologist Roy Breckinridge, who has spent much of his career thinking about ice. We visited the vents and well at the foot of the mesa in Spokane, and stumbled across talus slopes along the Clark Fork River. I asked him if the road crew could possibly have dug into a pocket of glacial ice. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “I think they exposed new ice.”He then patiently explained how each ice cave, shattered outcrop, and scree slide harbors its own peculiarities, depending upon the different sizes and shapes of the rocks and their placement in relation to each other.
In situations where air has enough room to flow through the spaces between the rocks, a sub-surface area can function much like a modern heat pump. Breezes can circulate in a cooling pattern and sink into a cavity that stores them in a passive sump. As air rises back through this natural system, it can combine with humidity to manufacture ice. All these configurations, for a geologist like Breckenridge, can be linked to earth-building processes of long ago. The question becomes which combination of natural forces arranged the rocks in just such a way to create these natural iceboxes. The answers to questions like this are rarely simple.
Imagining the Deluge
Roy Breckenridge is part of a long tradition of geologists, both amateur and professional, who have attempted to explain certain anomalies in the Inland Northwest landscape. In the 1920s, some of them focused on the extent of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the last ice age, and how that ice related to an array of features that stretch from western Montana across the Columbia Basin and beyond.
The Pleistocene story line at that time held that one lobe of the great ice sheet had pushed south at least as far as the Spokane River.A local geologist named Thomas Largé created a map that showed its cold tongue licking against the mesa where the Petersons lived. The power of that ice would have scraped and shattered rocks all along the mesa’s base; as the tongue retreated, it would have left behind erratic boulders and massive windrowsof debris. Largé proposed thatripple marks and scoured volcanic flows throughout the vicinity were the result of meltwater pushed to high velocities under the weight of the retreating ice lobe. Many established geologists agreed
“Just like here,” his niece said, leaning her head into the cool flow of air. “If we could crawl down into this hole, there would be Popsicles waiting for us.”
Many early newspapers and oral traditions throughout the Northwest contained reports about“ice caves,” “ice wells,” “ice tunnels,” “old ice,” and “blue ice” that mirrored the conditions of the odd vents in Spokane. In the days before electricity, such features were commonly used for refrigeration. In the town of Thompson Falls, Montana, on the Clark Fork River, early white settlers discovered that their basements often tapped into“cold air wells” that were perfect for preserving meat and produce. When a 1950s-era dam across Cabinet Gorge raised the water table upstream, it changed the dynamics of those drafty basements, and many old-timers were forced to purchase their first refrigerators. As recently as the 1980s, a road crew widening the state highway in the vicinity uncovered chunks of “ground ice” while removing rock from the base of surrounding outcrops. At the time, some reporters of the discovery wondered if the frozen blocks might be ancient ice left behind in the wake of the last glaciers.
Wondering whether all these accounts might be related, I contacted Idaho geologist Roy Breckinridge, who has spent much of his career thinking about ice. We visited the vents and well at the foot of the mesa in Spokane, and stumbled across talus slopes along the Clark Fork River. I asked him if the road crew could possibly have dug into a pocket of glacial ice. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “I think they exposed new ice.”He then patiently explained how each ice cave, shattered outcrop, and scree slide harbors its own peculiarities, depending upon the different sizes and shapes of the rocks and their placement in relation to each other.
In situations where air has enough room to flow through the spaces between the rocks, a sub-surface area can function much like a modern heat pump. Breezes can circulate in a cooling pattern and sink into a cavity that stores them in a passive sump. As air rises back through this natural system, it can combine with humidity to manufacture ice. All these configurations, for a geologist like Breckenridge, can be linked to earth-building processes of long ago. The question becomes which combination of natural forces arranged the rocks in just such a way to create these natural iceboxes. The answers to questions like this are rarely simple.
Imagining the Deluge
Roy Breckenridge is part of a long tradition of geologists, both amateur and professional, who have attempted to explain certain anomalies in the Inland Northwest landscape. In the 1920s, some of them focused on the extent of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the last ice age, and how that ice related to an array of features that stretch from western Montana across the Columbia Basin and beyond.
The Pleistocene story line at that time held that one lobe of the great ice sheet had pushed south at least as far as the Spokane River.A local geologist named Thomas Largé created a map that showed its cold tongue licking against the mesa where the Petersons lived. The power of that ice would have scraped and shattered rocks all along the mesa’s base; as the tongue retreated, it would have left behind erratic boulders and massive windrowsof debris. Largé proposed thatripple marks and scoured volcanic flows throughout the vicinity were the result of meltwater pushed to high velocities under the weight of the retreating ice lobe. Many established geologists agreed
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