Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
surfi cial materials, and the enhanced action of azonal processes. The earlier editions of
this text, like that of A. L. Washburn (1979), gave insuffi cient attention to the geological
control over periglacial landscapes.
1.3. THE GROWTH OF PERIGLACIAL KNOWLEDGE
Even before Lozinski proposed his periglacial concept, a scattered body of geomorphic
knowledge was available concerning the cold non-glacial regions of the world.
As might be expected, many of the earliest observations were by the European explor-
ers of the vast sub-arctic regions of North America and Eurasia. These were casual,
opportunistic, and non-scientifi c. For example, in Russian Alaska, the peculiarities of
frozen ground were observed in 1816 by members of the Otto von Kotzebue expedition
(von Kotzebue, 1821) as they traveled through the Bering Strait region (Figure 1.4). The
presence of massive bodies of ground ice, portrayed in Figure 1.4, was to subsequently
become a major component of periglacial study in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Elsewhere in Russia, Karl Ernst von Baer, an Estonian-German naturalist who had
traveled to Novaya Zemblya and Lapland in 1837, was the fi rst to report (Baer, 1838) upon
the excavation of a well in perennially-frozen ground at Yakutsk, central Siberia. Sub-
sequently, Alexander von Middendorf, Karl Baer's younger traveling companion from his
expedition to Lapland, descended the shaft, known today as Shergin's Well. The tempera-
tures that he measured (Middendorf, 1862) are the earliest published information on the
thermal regime of what is now termed permafrost. Middendorf correctly interpreted
the ground temperature variations with depth and recognized what is now referred to as
the “depth of zero-annual amplitude.”
In North America, the eighteenth-century employees of the Hudson Bay Company
occasionally made observations related to the terrain over which they traveled. Then, in
1839, Dr John Richardson, the physician who accompanied the explorer John Franklin on
his expeditions of 1819-22 and 1825-27, presented observations upon frozen ground in
North America (Richardson, 1839, 1841). Later, he sketched one of the distinctive pingos
of the Mackenzie Delta region, known locally today as Aklisuktuk (“the little one that is
Figure 1.4.
Members of the privately-fi nanced Russian expedition led by Otto von Kotzebue
examine exposed ground ice on Kotzebue Sound in 1816. 'Vue des Glaces dans le Paris', 1822, plate
IX. Painting from the Rasmuson Library Collection, University of Fairbanks-Alaska, donated by
the National Bank of Alaska.
