Cenozoic Glacial Geology
by
Hermyn Wyfflebaum
of Hallbridges

367 CY

If ever you travel far to the northwest, dear reader, you will see great sheets of ice stretching as far as the eye can see. In the northeast within the mountains are nestled great slabs of ice towering high beside the mountains. These glaciers have been a constant throughout the lives of the natives of each particular region, constantly changing but always there. Imagine the entire continent similarly enveloped in ice from the north to far to the south even passed the Amedio region. Clues from the past—rocky mounds, shallow depressions, the shapes of mountains, including the Hellfurnaces—that point back to an extraordinary Cenozoic Ice Age prove that at one point this whole portion of the world was completely covered in mountainous glaciers and sheets of ice.

"But wait," you say, "Can't all of this be determined through chronomantic magic?" We've all heard the buzz about the latest most popular magic school, but the whole discipline is faulty from the start. I am no spellcaster, but as I understand it the magic is nearly impossible without eyewitnesses having been present at the event's occurrence for the event to be viewed. The time period I am investigating had only long-haired pachyderms and various carnivorous rodentiae as its witnesses. For me, they help not at all. Now those magicians who oppose chronomantic magic also say it is closer to illusion than divination. That is an argument that I will let more knowledgeable combatants continue. But it is clear that the attacks the chronomancers have made on my position are more concerned with protecting their own shortcomings rather than discovering the truth.

Instead of looking for the quick and easy solution that magic often provides, I prefer to look at actual present time undweomered clues revealed skillfully with my rock hammer. And they are plentiful. I've travelled all across the western continent examining clues. There are mounds of large stones sometimes forming hills deposited by receding glaciers all through the northern quadrant of the continent. We call them moraines or kames. Also among the moraines and kames we find depressions that often act as reservoirs for rain water and those are commonly known as kettles. Nobody really challenges me in the idea that glaciers once extended as far as northern Keoland from the north, but what most scholars find preposterous is that glaciers covered the land all the way south to the Amedio. The proof exists. If one examines the Hellfurnace mountains it is quite evident that, volcanism aside, the mountains were carved by the abrasive action of ice. What my research has uncovered is that during the short period, geologically speaking, called the Cenozoic era between the Rapacious and the Curvaceous periods the whole northern half of the world was covered in ice that receded relatively rapidly leaving many clues to this fact all about.

First, let me explain that there are three types of glaciers. There is the valley glacier, which uses pre-existing mountain valleys as a directive funnel for the ice to travel in. Examples of valley glaciers can be seen in the mountain ranges of the Snow, Ice, and Frost Barbarians and high in the Crystalmist Mountains. There are the ice sheets of which the perfect example today is the sheet of black ice far in the northwest and finally there are the piedmont, as described by the Velunese, glaciers which are enormous glaciers composed of several valley glaciers running together that come spilling onto the lands beneath the mountains. One can find piedmont glaciers at the bases of the mountains in the Ice Barbarian lands.

In my travels, my geological investigations have revealed an exciting theory of the Cenozoic Ice Age. Imagine the continent before the Cenozoic as being generally higher in elevation and having only minor features on its surface. The ground was primarily a soft earth or clay with a few chains of rock reaching to the surface to create the existing topical variations. These chains of rock are now the Crystalmists, the Barrier Peaks, the Hellfurnaces, and all of the other current mountain chains we are familiar with. Now suppose far to the north on the other side of the Land of Black Ice are absolutely gargantuan mountains that miniaturize mountains that we know and suppose Oerth suffered a dramatic climatic alteration and temperatures dropped. The valley glaciers in the far northern mountains begin to let their valley glaciers flow south into the relatively featureless lands we now call Greyhawk. As these glaciers creep down and join each other, they begin to stack up in the form of a piedmont glacier until eventually the land is covered with one enormous ice sheet that spread from what is now known as the Amedio region all the way to the base of the huge mountains to the north scouring the rock and peeling away large amounts of surface soil. Now the end of the Cenozoic Ice Age witnesses the receding of the ice sheet slowly moving back until the land beneath is once again revealed. As the ice moves away, however, it deposits all of the soil and stones it was transporting and by the end of the Cenozoic Ice Age the formerly featureless land now has far more in the way of geologic character and now the black ice sheet in the north today is the terminus of this receding glacier.

The character of which I speak consists of various scratches and carvings, rough surfaces, pits and grooves, and fantastic hilly deposits all over the continent. I have travelled all over the western half of Greyhawk recording these phenomena as I have found them. The evidence is dramatic and telling. It describes a geologic development and proves my theory of the Cenozoic Ice Age without question.

The first evidence is that of generally parallel striations upon soft rock over which the glacier travelled. One can go north and find an abundance of these scratches on the blasted bedrock of the Rift area. A little less regular in the valleys of Geoff, Sterich, The Yeomanry and Ket the same striations exist over large stone floors and walls. I have been unable to identify if the marks indicate an advancing or retreating glacier, but the presence of a great weighty sheet of ice is certainly the culprit. Exploring far to the south in the tropics I have discovered similar striations upon the steep slopes of volcanic mountains deep in the Hellfurnaces themselves. There is also a great flat stone jutting from the sea on the coast south of Port Toli covered in these marks similar to an abundance of marked stones in The Quag and in the Icy Sea.

The reverse of the striations is the highly polished stone surface found where very hard stone is prevalent. It seems that most such rock exists on the western side of the Crystalmists and Barrier Peaks. I have travelled to these rustic lands as far south as the last "civilized" nation, Zeif, and the dangerous bandit stalked lands near the mountains to record the smoothed rock all along the valleys there. It is clear that the granite was polished by the action of ice creeping along the valleys.

Another indicator of glacial presence is deep grooved earth. If the ice can penetrate the soil where it is softest, it will. Groove patterns scar the land where the ice continuously lifted a channel of earth from the surface and continued to dig deeper. Geographically, I have recorded these grooves primarily throughout the nomad territories, whose inhabitants I find not so hurly-burly with a few gifts of strong drink, and weaving through the Cairn Hills. Likewise, the Rovers' lands are equally covered, who I found were quite generous in giving of their own strong drink. Anyway, it would seem that these grooves exist in the more northerly sectors of the continent where the ice sheet was thickest, however, I've catalogued them as far south as Keoland on the outskirts of the Hool. This further supports my ideas that ice did in fact cover most of this continent.

Next, the ice, as it moved forward, would bite and grip the bedrock and pull itself along leaving obvious crescent shaped marks in its path. I have seen them on stone valley floors and gouged deep into the canyon walls. I cannot determine direction of motion from these marks but their existential fact in areas of known glacial travel indicate their creation by ice. These crescent marks are seen all through the valleys of the Crystalmists and Barrier Peaks and north of those. More exciting was my find of the same crescent-like marks on a steep slope of volcanic glass in the Hellfurnaces, proof that the Hellfurnaces themselves were once covered in a great sheet of ice.

Ice when it passes also picks up and carries away stones from as big as a hand to as big as a house pulled up from seemingly solid rock floors. As the ice moves over the stone, any pieces weakened by cracks and joints can easily be lifted up and carried away. I expect it is this action that quarried a once gently rolling landscape into the jagged mountains known as the Barrier Peaks, the Crystalmists, the Drachensgrab, and the Hellfurnaces. The stones that were carried off now rest in enormous piles of glacial waste at the base of the Great Northern Mountains on the north side of the Land of Black Ice. It is this quarrying that gave Greyhawk the face it has today.

This kind of scouring, digging, and transporting leaves other traces besides jagged stone surfaces. All of that stone that has been gouged or lifted out must go somewhere and the pieces that have not made the journey far to the north has been left throughout the land as dust, sand, rocks, and boulders that exist in obvious glacially deposited forms. When glaciers melt and recede all of the detritus that they transport is left behind by various methods. Often streams of melt water carry silt and sand away from the glacier on a wending path leaving stratified layers placed in particular patterns or boulders and rocks begin collecting in areas where the ice has grown thin and it can no longer carry them and they are left behind in large jumbled mounds. I will now take great pleasure in describing the particulars.

If one examines the stones one can see that many of them found in glacial drift are entirely foreign to the area in which they are found. Most of the time stones are left only a few miles from whence they originated but sometimes they will be carried hundreds of miles. The most significant find in this category was a very large volcanic rock I discovered in Ulek. The nearest volcanic area is the Hellfurnace chain so a tremendous glacier would have had to carry this boulder on a long journey north where it lost its retreating momentum near the Drachensgrab mountains and dropped the stone as it melted away there.

Glacial forms made of these well-travelled stones are primarily in irregular mound shapes called moraines. When the glacier grows thin and it begins leaving the heavier stones behind, the boulders begin to act as a barrier or stopping block for other smaller stones still being carried by the glacier. The stones become lodged and keep adding to the collection in the pile until the ice recedes away entirely. All over Perrenland and Furyondy these piles dot the landscape, which I might add, have greatly aided Veluna defensively as Keoland continues its imperial expansion. I suspect the greatest moraines are the Cairn Hills themselves of which some have had passages carved out between the more massive naturally lodged stones to create the tombs within them. Likewise, the gnomes and halflings have burrowed out their dwellings created by the same tumbled stones in the Good Hills.

Similar to moraines are kames. They are piles of large stones, but they tend to be smaller and they are found near the walls of valleys and cliffs. As the glacier recedes up the valley and the ice grows weaker crevasses can form nearest the cliff walls. These can extend all the way to the valley floor, but they do not have to in order to create a kame. The crevasses act as funnels for debris on top of and throughout the glacier and rocks will continue to be deposited inside collecting them in a tidy lump until they are eventually left behind by the glacier. I have identified kames mostly in Perrenland valleys and seen them as far south as the Crystalmist Mountains.

The next formations I want to identify for you are those created by running melt water. Kame terraces are always located near valley walls. As glaciers are ablated they tend to pull away from the rock walls confining them. If the stream of melt water chooses the tunnel created between the glacier and the rock to travel then a kame terrace will be formed. As the stream flows, it continuously drops silt and sand in its path forcing the water to constantly take an irregular braided path, which changes often when the path becomes too heavily silted. The effect is a raised platform of dust and sand along the canyon wall when the glacier has finally fully receded. Often the top, if not too eroded, has a wavy or rippled surface—an effect of the constantly redirected stream. Because of their location often the terraces are dotted with kames. Geographically, I've discovered kame terraces in many valleys along the prominent mountain chain, but particularly fantastic ones can be seen in Ket where they are large and provide positions for archers to defend the region. The terraces here are also pocked by many kettles, which I will describe later.

If one travels high into the peaks of the Crystalmists sometimes small temporary lakes can be found. Glacial lakes are entirely composed of melt water and are created when blockage, usually deposited previously by the glacier, contains the water in a reservoir. Eventually the water will seep through or overflow the barrier and then by erosion the dam will burst. From what I can tell these lakes do not last very long, however, they do often last long enough to separate the sediment and silt. By the massiveness of the particles larger grains quickly settle to the bottom upon entering the reservoir from the stream while finer dust is carried further to settle more centrally. When one comes upon one of these lakes that has emptied, it is quite apparent traveling up the valley. First is found dried clay and then sand often taking a steep slope as the granules become coarser. I have seen a full lake before in the Crystalmists and I don't think purer water can be found on Oerth, excepting Rao's temples. Though high in the mountains these lakes clearly serve as a utility that allows creatures to live in the inhospitable region. When sampling the water ourselves we saw goat and bear tracks, giant and (from what my zoology friends tell me) yeti footprints and we suffered the rare opportunity of being attacked by an ice worm which devoured or scorched to death half of my Flan porters. Starvation and carelessness nearly killed the rest of us on our way back down and only three of us returned from that ill-starred trek. But that water was really good.

Without a doubt, the most fantastic structure of glacial debris we call the esker. Seen from the ground it appears as a long hill or ridge, but when viewed from a higher peak, one can see that it is an extensive narrow hill that snakes its way across the countryside. What it is, in fact, is an inverted streambed. Similar in origin to the kame terrace, the esker comes from glacial melt water from within the ice that bores a winding path through the ice rather than to the sides of it. As the stream flows it deposits sediments and builds up the stream bed encased in the ice tunnel. When the glacier recedes, all that remains is a long ridge of hard clay and sand that can twist its way north for miles. Eskers are common in the plains of the nomads and the rovers and in the bandit lands.

So we are witnesses to all of the forms created with the detritus of quarried stone and grooved earth and we understand how the glacier created its droppings all about the land shortly after the Cenozoic era. We can know just from these findings that ice once covered this whole continent. But still there is more evidence for this proof. The path and methodology the ice takes when it scratches and quarries its way across the land makes certain identifiable pits, holes, gouges, designs, and shapes.

The first of these I will mention can only be seen from a mountain top near a formerly glaciated plain. Viewed from a height, one can see a general large scale etching over the land in roughly parallel lines, not unlike the striations found on stones on the smaller scale. From the ground this texture is recognized only as furrows or gently rolling landscape. I discovered this once when I climbed a high peak south of the nomad lands in order to sketch a series of eskers. The whole of those plains is marked with great etchings and the people who live there have no idea they exist upon a great scuffed land.

Also found upon the flatter portions of earth are the drumlins. At first, they look like moraines because they often have glacial deposits upon them, but if examined closely one can see that the earth itself is raised into a low hill shape. As the ice travels over stone, it scratches and quarries it, but as it goes over soft earth, that which it does not carry off, it grips and squinches up into a low hillock. Drumlins can be seen through the Veluna-Bissel area and some as far south as northern Keoland. These hills are now conveniently used as high positions for locating Keoish troops by Velunese scouts.

Glaciers have the most effect upon the appearance of mountain valleys. If mountains had a great stream of ice flow through them, then generally it has a pronounced U-like shape at its base. I've found that if the surrounding stone is relatively soft then the walls will be near vertical and smooth. However, if the stone is hard then the valley sides tend to be stepped as weight of the covering ice competes with durability of stone in a contest to determine how much stone is eroded away. All of the valleys in the western continental chain have these characteristics.

Another common feature in glacially shaped valleys is the formation of hanging valleys, which may later become waterfalls. If an offshoot valley is not or not as heavily glaciated, the weight of the main glacier will carve out the U-shaped valley below the level of the side valley so at the point where the valleys converge there is a steep drop off from the floor of the offshoot valley to the floor of the main valley. Many of these mountain valleys now contain streams or rivers and those that run down the smaller side valleys plunge down the drop making very beautiful waterfalls. When we think of the far west we imagine brown-skinned dancing girls and oases in the middle of hot dusty plains and magic lamps containing djinni set amongst treasure troves stashed behind cascading waterfalls from the hot rocks above to the arid lands below. Well, I've found truth in the existence of many almost magical waterfalls, surely formed as described above, on the western side of the western continental mountain chain. That part of the stories I have verified. The rest is all, unfortunately, a pack of lies.

Let me tell you now about divots in the ground. Glaciers not only leave behind stone and sand, but on occasion they will leave behind separate chunks of ice of various sizes. These smaller bits of ice continue to act on the stone or earth on their own either by continuing to claw at the stone in a frozen state or by melting away and forcing the earth to deal with its absence.

The first I want to talk about is called a cirque. Cirques are found at the base of mountains and look like little angled pools cradled in the slope between the mountain and the valley floor. On the lower edge is usually a small pile of chipped stone and sand. What is going on here is the action of a mini glacier. Large glaciers require major weather trends to cause a glacier to advance or fall back but for a smaller piece of ice freezing, thawing, and then freezing again can be a matter of a few hours and the whims of fickle weather. When the water freezes, it grips the rock cracking and tearing at any part it can get into until it thaws at which point it draws back leaving behind broken bits from its assault upon the stone. When it freezes again it advances again picking up the crumbs it left behind and at its front carries these bits to cast them onto the pile at the lower edge while the ice quarries away the next layer beneath. This pattern continues until the water thaws and drains or evaporates away. The result is a roughly oval shaped smooth depression in the rock. Now I contend that the largest cirque ever found is, in fact, the Spendlowe Valley far to the south nestled in the Hellfurnace Mountains. Within this valley is a lake, extensive woodlands, and a small intellectual community. It is surrounded on all sides by mountains but I don't think it always was. I believe that a great piece of ice began carving out a cirque upon the base of the Hellfurnace Mountains. The waste it quarried away was pushed to the east and dumped in a tremendous pile, which has become known as the lesser range of the Kamph Mountains. Since its creation, the cirque has been reshaped by wind and water, has had natural springs fill part of it as a lake, and had soil introduced to provide a topsoil for plants to take root. The evidence I point to is the smooth face of the western mountains of the valley where the great glacier regularly scrubbed at the stone and the unexplained existence of the Kamph Mountains surrounding the lower lip of the valley. It was enormous quantities of flowing ice this far south during the Cenozoic period that shaped this now-idyllic haven of learning which has a cottage, which has a desk upon which I am writing this treatise just now.

Now many tell me I am full of shit for suggesting this hypothesis. To them I can only request they provide a better explanation. Since most can't I can better them by providing a secondary albeit lesser explanation as thus: Up north in Perrenland and Furyondy and those environs we can see many holes of varying depths in the earth. These pits were, despite the multitude of boulders within them, or perhaps because of this, instrumental in freeing those nations from the grip of the Overking by being points of military maneuvers. The holes in question are called kettles. Kettles are formed by ice chunks left behind by receding glaciers that are half or wholly buried in the earth, which then melts away. When the ice is gone, it leaves behind a large hole or depression that usually ends up filled with stagnant rain water during the wet seasons. In any case, similar holes can be found farther south and within the kame terraces of Ket. If the idea of the Spendlowe Valley being a cirque seems too unbelievable, then, I would suggest that instead it is an enormous kettle created at the end of the Cenozoic era as the glacier moved north leaving behind a large earth locked piece of ice. This, however, does not explain the Kamph Mountains.

Finally, and most peripherally, is the existence of various frozen ground phenomena. In places where moisture in the earth has actually frozen, one can see some distinctive evidence. The reason I want to discuss this is because there are places in the south where the regular temperatures even during the winter months cannot create these effects yet it is apparent that at some time thousands of years ago in areas near to the tropics the earth was frozen solid.

First there is frost wedging. It is not uncommon to see talus and scree beneath an eroded cliff face, but generally it is a sign that the stone is weak and decaying and crumbles into an equally unstable pile beneath the cliff. If, however, the talus seems stable and unmovable and the stone seems sound, then it was most likely cracked away from the cliff by the freezing and then melting of water within the joints of the stones in the cliff face. This also means that temperatures drop below freezing with some regularity as the recurring freezing and thawing action works to make cracks larger and larger over time. So when we see evidence of frost wedging in the Yeomanry and Keoland we can assume that the average temperature was much lower year round than it is today. Based on weathering and erosion the talus that was formed by frost wedging in these areas was created over a thousand years ago and has not moved since it fell from the cliff. I think the events occurred during the end of the Cenozoic period as the glaciers receded and their results have remained since. Considering all of the evidence previously mentioned of glacial activity in the Hellfurnace chain, I think that frost wedging occurred there too, however, the nearly constant volcanic and seismic activity in the area would easily be responsible for disturbing talus and thus obliterating all evidence of it.

There are also a couple of loose stone forms created by the freezing and thawing of soil. They are called stone streams and rock glaciers. Like frost wedging, these phenomena occur only in places where the earth regularly freezes and thus keeps the soil loose and soft. When the soil beneath many tons of jumbled boulders loosens and shifts then so do the rocks that rest upon it. This process is gradual and is apparent only with careful observation. With the aid of gravity and natural barriers these stones may line up and take the form of a stream moving down a slope or in the case of great stone fields with little restrictions the stones will move like a glacier in lobe form. From a higher vantage either of these forms look remarkable and sometimes even constructed as a barrier by civilized beings, but they are not. The stone streams and rock glaciers I have identified in the south have stagnated and have settled in the earth with only rain to occasionally disrupt their regimen causing possibly catastrophic slides of stones which hurry their journey to their ultimate low point destination. Active stone streams and rock glaciers can still be seen in the northern mountains bordering the nomad lands. Again, hard evidence of a colder climate exists in these forms as far south as the Yeomanry, but we can assume that similar evidence is absent in the Spendlowe Valley because of the frequent tremors that plague the region.

I think I have stated my position quite well and would deem any opponent of my experiences and interpretations a complete nincompoop. Most geologic specialists claim that glacial ice only got as far south as northern Keoland. I say that's a pile of horse poop set in place by a bunch of armchair theorists and chronomancers who didn't want to take the time to strike out into the field and make sound observations from hard evidence that exists all around. I have travelled the peaks and valleys of the active volcanoes of the Hellfurnaces. I have followed the icy valleys to the tops of the Crystalmists and I have braved the legendary Barrier Peaks. When the others tell me that Spendlowe Valley is a volcanic crater, I have to ask if any of them have ever seen a volcano before. Furthermore, I tell them they are crazy because I, a well travelled and knowledgeable sage, would never knowingly reside in the expulsive point of a volcano. It is undoubtedly an ice-formed cirque. This conversation will go on needlessly for many decades, but it is only a matter of time before the many sages and theorists exit their comfortable libraries and come see the clues for themselves. Then we will all understand that the Cenozoic era was much more significant in shaping Oerth than we once presumed.

~*~

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