A tarn (or corrie loch) is a mountain lake, pond or pool, formed in a cirque excavated by a glacier. A moraine may form a natural dam below a tarn.
For some time before his death, Rutherford had a small hernia, which he neglected to have fixed, and it became strangulated, rendering him violently ill. Despite an emergency operation in London, he died four days afterwards, at Cambridge on 19 October 1937 at age 66, of what physicians termed “intestinal paralysis”.