244 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1932 



To have proceeded to any great altitude on Mount Fridtjof Nansen 

 would have been fraught with considerable uncertainty and would 

 have consumed a great deal more time. We had determined the 

 significance of the flat-lying cap rocks and therefore decided to 

 turn our attention to sledging eastward along the foot of the range 

 toward its junction with the supposed Carmen Land, whose existence 

 we had begun seriously to doubt. This was an eventful journey. 

 Thorne undertook the task of mapping as we went along, an arrange- 

 ment which left me free to devote my attention to the rocks and 

 the glaciers. 



EASTWARD ALONG THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAINS 



It was soon seen that the fault scarp of the Queen Maud Moun- 

 tains proper proceeded almost due east from Axel Heiberg Glacier 

 rather than southeastward across the plateau or bounding it as 

 indicated by Amundsen. Furthermore, the proportion of old pre- 

 Cambrian ragged mountains increased, and the tabular mountains 

 retreated farther into the plateau and became ever lower as we pro- 

 ceeded eastward. Likewise, the outlet glaciers became ever larger, 

 though without being able to handle adequately the great volume of 

 ice that flows down from the plateau and almost smothers the moun- 

 tains eastward from the one hundred and fiftieth meridian. Even 

 so, one almost immediately discovers that the ice is much thinner 

 here than formerly. We climbed the outlying peaks in longitude 

 157° and found that to heights of as much as 800 feet above the 

 present ice level the mountain tops were rounded and polished 

 (pi. 4, figs. 2, 3). How much thicker the ice may have been 

 there is no way to tell. Farther eastward Supporting Party Moun- 

 tain and its associated nunataks appear to have been formerly cov- 

 ered by the ice. This is quite different from the conditions about 

 Axel Heiberg and Liv Glaciers. Doubtless Fridtjof Nansen, Ruth 

 Gade, and the other high mountains in this vicinity have always 

 been high enough partially to stem even the greatest streams of ice 

 from inland and thus prevent such extensive glaciation of the foot- 

 hills as we found prevalent to the eastward. 



Supporting Party Mountain marked our farthest east; and, since 

 its location was east of the one hundred and fiftieth meridian, we 

 were within the sector claimed by the commander for the United 

 States and named by him in honor of his wife, Marie Byrd Land. 

 His claim was based on the fact that he had flown over the newly 

 discovered land in the latitude of Little America. In substantia- 

 tion we built a cairn on the top of Supporting Part}'^ Mountain and 

 raised the flag. Inside the cairn we left a tin can containing a note 



