THE GREAT BARRIER 309 



point, as I shall presently show, and, indeed, the fact itself was 

 wonderfully impressive when we came to consider what must 

 once have been the condition of Victoria Land. The Ferrar 

 Glacier probably contains as much ice as any hitherto known 

 in the world; the Barne and Shackleton Glaciers contain a 

 great deal more. Yet in the first of these we saw that the ice 

 must have been from 3,000 to 4,000 feet above its present level, 

 and we knew that naturally the others must have been enlarged 

 in like proportion. It is difficult to conceive the vastness of 

 these great ice-streams at the period of maximum glaciation. 



The Great Barrier. — If the lofty plateau of Victoria Land 

 is unique and wonderful, surely this great plain on the sea-level 

 is still more marvellous. It was a surprise to everyone, and not 

 least to ourselves, to find that our long journey to the south 

 was made without a rise of level. What was the thickness of 

 the ice-sheet to the south, or what lay beneath it, was obviously 

 impossible for us to determine, but on collecting all the 

 indirect evidences which bear on these points, I came to a 

 conclusion which I still hold — that the greater part of it is 

 afloat j and, strange as it is to imagine that the sea should run 

 beneath such a solid sheet for so many hundreds of miles, I 

 have yet to learn any reasonable argument against such an idea. 

 As there are some, however, who do not agree with my con- 

 clusion, I will endeavour to give the reasons which guided me 

 in forming it. 



In first considering the edge of the Barrier the reader will 

 see that on the chart the height of the cliff is given in feet and 

 the depth of the sea in fathoms ; if the proportion of five or 

 even six to one be taken as the depth of the submerged ice, a 

 small calculation will show that there are still some hundreds 

 of fathoms of water between the bottom of the ice and the 

 floor of the sea. And the Barrier edge sixty years ago was in 

 advance of its present position, in places as much as twenty or 

 thirty miles, consequently our soundings lie directly beneath 

 Sir James Ross's Barrier and a long way from its edge. The 

 part that has broken away must therefore have been water- 

 borne, and this at least shows the possibility of the ice-sheet 



