Science, Geology and Physics 



The Niagara gorge. [A review of Taylor on "Origin of the gorge of 1898 

 the whirlpool rapids at Niagara."] (Science, May 6, 1898. New ser. 

 7:627.) 



When the gorge of Niagara was first ascribed to work of 

 the river, it was tacitly postulated that the volume of the water 

 and the rate of recession of the falls had been constant. This 

 postulate gave way before the suggestion that variations in river 

 volume may have occurred during the disappearance of the ice 

 sheet. Now it is attempted to correlate these variations in volume 

 on the one hand with the retreating ice front, the northeastward 

 elevation of the land, and the temporary discharge of the upper 

 great lakes across Ontario, and on the other hand with the breadth 

 and depth of the gorge. A recent paper by Taylor on the 

 " Origin of the Gorge of the Whirlpool Rapids at Niagara " 

 (Bull. Geol. Soc. Am., IX, 1898, 59-84) explains the narrow 

 part of the gorge, where it is crossed by the railroad bridges and 

 occupied by the Whirlpool Rapids, as the work of the discharge 

 of Lake Erie alone — that discharge being called the Erie- 

 Niagara River — while the upper lakes ran to the St. Lawrence 

 by the Nipissing-Mattawa channel, eastward from the then 

 expanded Georgian Bay. Before the ice sheet had retreated far 

 enough to open this outlet the upper lakes discharged through 

 Erie, and the large volume of Niagara at that time caused the 

 erosion of the wider gorge and deeper gorge just below and above 

 the Whirlpool. 



It is thus implied that the channel of Detroit River must have 

 been laid dry while the Erie-Niagara was cutting its narrow 

 gorge, and of this Taylor has found good evidence in the depth 

 to which the valleys of small tributaries of the Detroit are eroded 

 below the present river surface. The manner in which many 

 independent factors are thus correlated is really of dramatic 

 interest. 



[Review of "Another episode in the history of Niagara Falls," by 1898 

 Joseph William Winthrop Spencer.] (Nature, Dec. 29, 1898. 

 59:214.) 



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