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MALASPINA GLACIER.
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south end of the Hitchcock range, and again about the base of the Chaix hills.

When a stream flows along the side of a glacier a movement in the ice or the sliding of stone and dirt from its surface sometimes obstructs the drainage and causes the formation of another variety of marginal lakes. In such instances the imprisoned waters usually rise until they can find an outlet across the barrier and then cut a channel through it.

A glacier in flowing past the base of a mountain frequently obstructs the drainage of lateral valleys and causes lakes to form. These usually find outlets, as in the case of lakes at the end of mountain spurs, through a subglacial or englacial tunnel, and are filled or emptied according as the tunnel through which the waters escape affords free drainage or is obstructed. Several examples of this variety of marginal lakes occur on the west and north sides of the Chaix hills. They correspond in the mode of their formation with the well-known Merjelen See of Switzerland.

Other variations in the manner in which glaciers obstruct drainage might be enumerated, but those mentioned cover all of the examples thus far observed about Malaspina glacier. The conditions which lead to the formation of the marginal lakes are unstable, and the records which the lakes leave in the form of terraces, deltas, etc., are consequently irregular. When streams empty into one of these lakes, deltas and horizontally stratified lake beds are formed, as in ordinary water bodies, but as the lakes are subject to many fluctuations, the elevations at which the records are made are continually changing, and in instances like those about Malaspina glacier, where the retaining ice body is constantly diminishing, may occupy a wide vertical interval.

Drainage begins on the southeast side of Chaix hills at Moore's Nunatak, where during the time of our visit there were two small lakes, walled in on nearly all sides by the moraine covered ice of Malaspina glacier. The water filling these basins comes principally from the high ice fall at the north, where the glacier descends over a projecting spur running east from