BYRD ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION GOULD 243 



Strom Camp in honor of Sverre Strom who had helped so much in 

 our preparations for the sledge trip. Without too much difficulty 

 we made our way up this glacier to the rocks on the northern slope 

 of Mount Fridtjof Nansen and at two separate points about 3 miles 

 apart climbed part way up the side of the mountain and thus got a 

 partial cross section of these long-sought rocks. 



The flat-lying sandstone series was found to rest upon the even 

 surface of a coarse-grained gray granite. This contact zone was at 

 5,960 feet, and the series continues upward apparently to the very top 

 of the mountain itself, which means that it totals more than 7,000 

 feet in thickness. Both the sandstones themselves and the underlying 

 granite are intruded with dolerite sills, showing conspicuous vertical 

 jointing and weathering into angular pinnacled forms in contrast to 

 the softer outlines generally taken on by the sandstones themselves. 



We climbed across a vertical exposure of 2,000 feet of this sand- 

 stone series. It exhibits some variation in texture and composition, 

 but its most characteristic aspect is that of a fairly fine-grained 

 yellow to gray, thinly banded sandstone with scattered lenses of white 

 sandstone up to 5 feet in thickness. In more massive phases it is 

 greatly cross-bedded. It passes into dark, even black, sEaly facies 

 which contain considerable organic matter, sufficient in places to 

 identify the rock as a low-grade coal. From one such layer Thorne 

 brought some fragments of a hard, bright, shiny coal which burned 

 reluctantly when a match was applied. Of course the whole sand- 

 stone series, including the highly carbonaceous layers, has been 

 profoundly affected by the intrusion of the dolerite sills. In the 

 vertical section that we crossed about a third of the thickness was due 

 to the dolerite. Looking upward, one had the impression that the 

 sills were fewer and thinner tow^ard the top. The sandstones are 

 almost everywhere quartzitic, and the shaly facies have been changed 

 in places into a hard rock with almost slaty cleavage. 



There is no question that this great series of sandstones and asso- 

 ciated rocks is at least lithologically equivalent to Ferrar's Beacon 

 sandstone of South Victoria Land. The lower portion of that sand- 

 stone, in places at least, is Devonian and grades upward into 

 Mesozoic with the great bulk of it comprised in the " Perma- 

 Carboniferous " sandstones and coal measures. I have not com- 

 pleted the examination of the rocks we collected, so that I am not 

 prepared definitely to state whether they contain fossils or not. I 

 could find none in the field. 



It was on our first ascent up the slopes of Mount Fridtjof Nansen 

 that Edward Goodale found bits of gray lichens. In the course of 

 the summer we found other growths even farther south than this, 

 though they were nowhere prolific. 

 149571—33 17 



