Broad flats clothed with rhododendron, alternate with others covered with mud, boulders, and gravel, which had flowed down from the gorges on the west, and which still contained trees, inclined in all directions, and buried up to their branches; some of these debacles were 400 yards across, and sloped at an angle of 2 degrees to 3 degrees, bearing on their surfaces blocks fifteen yards in diameter.
"Himalayan Journals V2."
J. D. Hooker
As the terminal moraines are the most prominent of all the monuments left by a receding glacier, so are they the most liable to obliteration; for violent floods or debacles are sometimes occasioned in the Alps by the sudden bursting of glacier-lakes, or those temporary sheets of water before alluded to which are caused by the damming up of a river by a glacier which has increased during a succession of cold seasons, and descending from a tributary into the main valley, has crossed it from side to side.
"The Antiquity of Man"
Charles Lyell
He hung with unqualified joy on the imagined ruins of imaginary disaster, and took equal pleasure in the actual debacles of life as it was lived about him.
"The Goose Man"
Jacob Wassermann