ABSTRACT
Realization that an enormous area of the land surface of the earth has been overrun by glacier ice at least once and probably many times in very recent geological time, spread relatively quickly after the publication of Études sur les glaciers by Louis Agassiz in 1840. Despite many diversions created by poorly founded and sometimes fantastic arguments, the glacial theory was well established by the beginning of the present century, and some of the most perceptive observations had been made and the essential relationships between process and landform by way of sedimentological properties established by the 1930s. Further progress was inhibited by the need for a stronger observational basis, especially in subglacial locations, and by the rudimentary state of glaciological theory. With the rapid rise of the science of glaciology in the 1950s and 1960s, glaciological theory overtook that of glacial geomorphology and sedimentology and it is only in the last two decades that work in the field has been tailored to formulation of general theories of glacial erosion and deposition.
