! 



246 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 2 



The Queen Maud Mountains proper do not trend southeastward 

 from Axel Heiberg Glacier. This supposed plateau range represents 

 but the peaks that fringe the great outlet glaciers. From far out 

 on the shelf ice we could look many miles up these glaciers, and 

 Thorne was able to get sights on peaks along the glaciers at great 

 distances behind the front ranges themselves. It will be noticed that 

 Beardmore Glacier is fringed by such mountains, and it is easy to see 

 how anyone sledging or flying some distance to the east or west of 

 such a glacier and parallel to it would get the definite impression 

 that he was seeing a new mountain range. Yet it is at once appar- 

 ent that all of these are integral parts of the geological structure of 

 the great Queen Maud system itself. 



Thoujih the coal measures are not coextensive with the Beacon 

 sandstone, yet they are sufficiently so to enable us to state rather 

 definitely that the Antarctic has coal reserves second only to those 

 of the United States. The discovery of coal on Mount Fridtjof 

 Nansen and the extension of the Beacon sandstones at least to longi- 

 tude 145° W. add many thousands of square miles to the coal areas 

 already known in South Victoria Land. 



The removal of Carmen Land from the map and the extension of 

 the Ross Shelf Ice eastward at least as far as the one hundred and 

 fortieth meridian in the latitude of our journey reopens the old ques- 

 tion of the connection of Ross and Weddell Seas. Two newly ob- 

 served features offer possible objections to this hypothesis — Leverett 

 Glacier and the Edsel Ford Mountains. Leverett Glacier is by 

 all odds the largest outlet glacier seen by us; and, so far as we 

 could tell, the relatively small streams of ice that fed it from the 

 south were insufficient to account for its great volume. Its very 

 direction of flow suggests a source not necessarily from the south but 

 rather from some great opening toward the east, as though there 

 were a mountain wall in that direction. Nevertheless we could see 

 no such structure, and it may possibly be explained by the existence 

 of larger tributary glaciers from the south beyond our vision. The 

 nunataks east of Supporting Party Mountain help to give it a west- 

 erly flow. 



The Edsel Ford Mountains beyond King Edward VII Land, dis- 

 covered on the flight of December 5, 1921), were photographed from 

 so great a distance that one can not draw positive conclusions from 

 the aerial photographs. But these appear to show a great range with 

 a straight fault-line scarp that suggests the structure of the Queen 

 Maud Mountains. It is possible that these new mountains are con- 

 nected somewhere with the Queen Maud Mountains and so constitute 

 the eastern structural boundary of the great Ross senkungsfeld. 

 This of course does not necessarily follow. At any rate, what is one 



