esker

Every foot of the landscape from here on north would be scored and scarred with reminders of glaciation—scattered boulders called erratics, drumlins, eskers, high tarns, cirques.

The Lost 40’s geology includes an 11,000-year-old ice age relic known as an esker, which VanNingen described as a “glacial, gravelly deposit.”

The incredible terrain is in northern Canada, which is ridged with thousands of eskers — the sinuous, gravelly remains of streams and rivers that flowed beneath the ice.

The esker is fully a quarter of a mile long, about thirty feet high, and four rods wide at its base.

In places where the low ground is marshy, roads and railways often follow the ridge-lines of hills, Lines of communication. or, as in Finland, the old glacial eskers, which run parallel to the shore.