CANTERBURY GLACIERS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 162, 14 August 1914, Page 3

CANTERBURY GLACIERS.

LECTURE BY MR SPEIGHT. Last evening the series of popular literary and scientific lectures in aid of the Canterbury College Library Fund was when Mr R. Speight, curator of the Canterbury Museum and Lecturer in Geology at Canterbury College, delivered a lantern lecture on "The and Gorges of Central Canterbury.'' Dr. Chilton briefly introduced the speaker to the fairly large audience which had gathered in the College Hall. In his opening remarks Mr Speight explained that his lecture dealt, with a part of the mountain district of Canterbury somewhat out of the ken of most people, the country at the head of the Rakaia, Ashburton, and Rangitata Rivers, and also north of the route to Mount Cook. ' " This district," he said, ."is one which has"alpine beauties of a peculiarly high order. The mountains are not very high. Mount Arrowsmith, the highest peak, being only 9000 feet, yet they are so placed that they nourish glaciers among the largest in temperate regions." Mr Speight then proceeded. with the history and description of the country in detail, from the time of Potts, the discoverer of Lake Heron, in the 60 's. He traced the travels of' von Haast, Sinclair, and Butler, and showed Sinclair's lonely grave, he having been drowned in crossing . the Rangitata River. Continuing, he said that in 1863 rewards were offered for the finding of a route through to the West Coast, and Whitcombe and Jacob Loper went up the Rangitata, discovered the pass now called after the first named, where Whitcombe met his death in the Teremakau.

About the district of the Potts, Cameron, and Wilbcrforce were remains of coal, going to indicate that at one time coal measures expended throughout the country, and these were the remains of a widely. extending sheet of coal measures. Touching on glaciation, the lecturer explained, by means of views and diagrams, that the rivers of to-day occupy positions which do not correspond with the original valleys. This suggested a former glaciation, and there existed undoubted proof that the country was at one time covered with an ice sheet, when probably the Rakaia Glacier was 60 miles in length,. and only the tops of the mountains appeared above the ice. The ice fields would have had a breadth of ten miles, approximating in some degree those at the Antarctic. The whole of the country in the region about Lake Heron was almost monotonous in its smoothness, and the masses of rock found in moraines were much scored, grooved, and scratched, as the result of their having been ground underneath the great ice-sheet.