256 PHYSIOGRAPHY OF CENTRAL-ASIAN DESERTS AND OASES. 
shown in sections of deflation, but there are significant fan-shaped areas of much- 
disturbed stratification spreading out from the main valleys. Within these, the 
surface is broken into irregularly distributed mounds where wind-carving has 
exposed an arched structure, conformable to the original surface. Among them 
are miniature lakes of clear, fresh water, up to a few hundred yards in width and 
10 to 20 feet below the plain, their walls extending vertically into the water. 
All these facts, together with the utter lack of external hydrographic relations, 
led Professor Pumpelly to suggest their origin to be a caving-in of sediments 
on to underlying lobes of melting ice. And that seemed a logical explanation of 
the whole disturbance. It was corroborated in 1904 by my discovery of actual 
exposures of that ice, sections of ancient buried lobes in the bluffs around some 
of these pools; characteristic glacier ice lying beneath 5 to ro feet of lake sediments 

Fig. 436.—An Ice Dome, and its Third and Fourth Epoch Moraines in the foreground 
(Kara Kul). 
where exposed. At first it may seem too extraordinary that the ice of an ancient 
glacial epoch should exist to-day, but, when realizing that the temperature over © 
these steppes falls to 10° and 12° F. at night during the warmest part of the sum- 
mer, it appears more natural. We shall have to attribute it to the second of our 
glacial epochs, having found it towards the limits of that expansion and 7 miles 
from the end of the glacier to-day. 
So in some way or other Kara Kul rose to drown the piedmont sheets of 
ice-and bury them with its sediments of glacier-ground stuff. The corresponding 
shore-lines are on the peninsula well-preserved beaches of wave-action 200 feet 
above the present level. The open water for wave-action and sedimentation of 
glacier-ground stuff, together with vegetable life—grass like the present—all this 
during the second glacial epoch is of great significance. We must believe it 
