BERING SEA 
I 9 I 
partial disintegration. They run straight for long dis¬ 
tances. The chief agencies competent to produce such 
features are faulting and glacial sculpture, and in this 
case glacial sculpture appears to me the more probable 
agent, although subsequent weathering seems to have de¬ 
stroyed those minor details of configuration which one 
naturally seeks as confirmatory evidence. 
There are two accessory features which lend support to 
the hypothesis 
of glaciation. 
In the far dis¬ 
tance, at the 
head of the 
bay, we could 
see that its 
trough is con¬ 
nected with 
two or more 
land valleys, 
and it was evi¬ 
dent that the 
valley most nearly in the direct line of prolongation is dis¬ 
tinctly U-form in cross-profile and has walls of simple con¬ 
tour. The other feature is a niche, high on the wall of the 
fiord, having the form of a cirque or hanging valley (fig. 93). 
In this case I attach little weight to the testimony of the 
hanging valley, because it has no companion on the long 
line of cliffs, and therefore may possibly be a simulative 
form, determined by local peculiarities of rock texture; 
but the distant valley is distinctively glacial in habit. 
It seems to me on the whole probable that the fiords 
of this coast contained Pleistocene glaciers of large size, 
which extended farther seaward than the general line of 
the present coast, but that the spaces between the fiords 
were not covered by ice. 
