292 CLIMATIC CONDITIONS OF THE GLACIAL EPOCH. 



latitude than has yet been reached. That the condition of the ocean near 

 the Pole varies considerably from year to year, in respect to the extent and 

 position of tlie frozen areas and driit or pack ice, is generally admitted. 

 Whether there has been, on the whole, a gain in the amoimt of ice within 

 the historic period so as to have rendered navigation more difficult, as sug- 

 gested in the preceding chapter, is a question which cannot as yet be 

 definitely answered.* 



The investigator of glacial phenomena must not forget that the freezing 

 of the ocean and the formation of ice on land are two very diflerent things. 

 If the temperature of the earth were sufficiently reduced there can be no 

 doubt but that the ocean would freeze up, and finally become a solid mass 

 of ice. That this result would be accompanied by a prodigious accumulation 

 of snow or ice on the land, as seems generally to be assumed, can by no 

 means be taken for granted. The evidence collected by exploi'ers of the far 

 northern regions seems to indicate that land in the immediate vicinity of an 

 eternally frozen ocean may itself be but thinly covered with snow. Nor 

 does it appear that the frozen surface of the ocean will have heaped upon it 

 heavy .deposits of either ice or snow, so as to form eventually what might be 

 called an ice-sheet of great thickness. The pakeocrystic ice-fields do not 

 give birth to icebergs, although the ice-floes detached from them maj' pro- 

 duce some of those effects often considered by geologists to be exclusively 

 the result of glacier action. 



The above general remarks seem all that is necessary as a preliminary 

 to a review of the glacial conditions of the various island groups and land 

 masses of the North Polar region. We may begin with the land nearest to 

 Europe, then take up Greenland and the adjacent parts of North America, 

 and afterwards the less important island of Iceland. 



The group of islands known by the collective name of Spitzbergen offers 

 an interesting field for the study of glaciers and the meteorological and 

 topographical conditions influencing their formation. Lying as these islands 

 do in so high a northern latitude (76°-81°) in a position to receive a large 

 amount of precipitation, being in the line of an abnormal warming of the 

 ocean, due to currents coming from southern regions, and being very 

 mountainous, they are necessarily extensively glaciated. But it is not by 

 any means the case that the whole surfiice of the land is covered with snow 

 or ice ; on the contrary, hei'e, as everywhere else, even in this extreme 



* See an/e, p. 2i0. 



