March 23, 1922 
Canada 
Geological Survey 
Bulletin No. 34 
GEOLOGICAL SERIES, No. 41 
PHYSIOGRAPHY AND GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF GASPE 
By A. P. Coleman 
INTRODUCTION AND REFERENCES TO PREVIOUS WORK 
It is generally assumed that all eastern Canada was covered by the 
Labrador ice-sheet when it reached its greatest extension; but in regard to 
one part of the region, the Gaspe peninsula, there is little evidence to support 
this view. The earliest geologists to visit Gaspe seem to have overlooked 
glacial matters altogether in their reports. Sir Wm. Logan crossed the 
peninsula near its middle, from Cap-Chat to Chaleur bay, in 1844, and 
his assistant, Murray, visited in the following year Shickshoclc mountains 
a little farther east, but glacial features are unmentioned in their reports; 
and the same is true of Richardson in 1857. In “Geology of Canada, 
1863”, summing up previous geological work in Canada, there are numerous 
references to Gaspe, but not one suggestion of glacial features. Low’s 
account of the region in the Report of Progress for 1882-4, treats of the 
bedrock geology and the topography, but mentions no drift deposits, 
though it refers to the loose blocks strewn over the tops of Shickshoclc 
mountains. Until 1863, there is no hint of ice action in Gaspe In that 
year Robert Bell, who accompanied Richardson as naturalist in his journey 
up Magdalen river and across to Gaspe basin, gives an account of the 
superficial geology of Gaspe peninsula, 1 describing “unmodified drift,” a 
“stiff and sticky sandy clay containing gravel and boulders”; which he 
believed to be of local origin, since he found no travelled stones in it. He 
considers that floating ice carried boulders and left them on the lower 
levels. 
The most important references to glacial action in Gaspe are to be 
found at a much later date in Chalmers’ reports on the Pleistocene of 
eastern Canada, published by the Survey in 1894, 1897, and 1904. He 
examined most of the coast-line of the peninsula, working out the marine 
beaches in some detail, and recording a few occurrences of striae, boulder 
clay, and erratics. In the main he agrees with Bell, that except for boulders 
carried by floating ice and deposited at or below the level of marine sub- 
mergence, the effects of ice action to be seen lit Gaspe are due to local 
glaciers only, since the Laurentide ice-sheet did not cross the St. Lawrence 
east of Quebec. 
1 Can. Nat. and Geol., vol. VIII, pp. 175, etc. 
