The Wide View
by Jon Burch Photography
Title
The Wide View
Artist
Jon Burch Photography
Medium
Photograph - Digital Photography
Description
This is a wide view of the big cirque near the highest part of Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain Park in northern Colorado. A cirque is an amphitheater like valley formed by glacial erosion. It may also be a similarly shaped land form arising from fluvial erosion.
The concave shape of a glacial cirque is open on the downhill side, while the cupped section is generally steep. Cliff-like slopes, down which ice and glaciated debris combine and converge, form the three or more higher sides. The floor of the cirque ends up bowl-shaped as it is the complex convergence zone of combining ice flows from multiple directions and their accompanying rock burdens: hence it experiences somewhat greater erosion forces, and is most often over deepened below the level of the cirque's low-side outlet and its down slope valley. If the cirque is subject to seasonal melting, the floor of the cirque most often forms a tarn or small lake behind a dam which marks the downstream limit of the glacial over deepening: the dam itself can be composed of moraine, glacial till, or a lip of the underlying bedrock.
These small snowfields represent about all that is left of the glacier that carved the bowl shaped depression during the last ice age.
Some digital effects were applied to the original image after the photograph was made. No electrons were harmed during the transition. Your finished photograph will not contain the Fine Art America watermark.
Image copyright 2021 Jon Burch Photography.
Uploaded
September 3rd, 2021
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