SOME ICE PROBLEMS, OF ANTARCTICA 

 R. E. Priestley and C. S. Wright 



Summary of Antarctic Paleoclimatology 



No problems having reference to the Antarctic regions are more 

 difficult of solution than those that are concerned with their past 

 climatic history, and no speculations are more enthralling than those 

 that can be based upon the somewhat slender evidence which is all 

 that is available on this subject. Sufficient is known, however, 

 to suggest strongly that glacial conditions about the south pole have 

 been the exception rather than the rule. Positive evidence of possible 

 warmer climates is first found in Cambrian deposits, where an Archaeo- 

 cyathus limestone, certainly of considerable extent, probable under- 

 lying the pole itself and stretching northward on either side through 

 many degrees of latitude into East and West Antarctica respectively, 

 is a witness to what were more likely temperate than frigid seas. 

 One might argue more strongly in favor of a genial climate from the 

 evidence provided by these common ancestors of sponges and corals 

 were it not that the forms are stunted and possess indurated skeletons 

 suggestive of existence under conditions somewhat unpropitious for 

 their full development. 



From Cambrian times on, the paleontological record is almost 

 lacking, until in the Permo-Carboniferous period we find far more 

 conclusive evidence of warmer conditions than now exist. That 

 Antarctica was the home of the ancestors of the Glossopteris flora 

 many paleobotanists assert. Whether this is the case or not, it is 

 certain that in East Antarctica a flourishing land flora, with strongly 

 developed trees and with swamp or forest vegetation capable of form- 

 ing beds of coal, some of them several feet in thickness, found a 

 congenial home well south of latitude 80° S., probably, indeed, across 

 the pole. Judging from the paleobotanical evidence in South Victoria 

 Land, similar climatic conditions may have existed well into Rhetic 

 times, while in West Antarctica we have conclusive evidence that 

 the widespread warm-temperate or subtropical climate of the Jurassic 

 period embraced Antarctica, as, indeed, it did also Greenland, Spits- 

 bergen, and other Arctic lands. If one imagines a Yorkshire consid- 

 erably warmer than that of the present day, in all probability with 

 no appreciable winter, and then realizes that West Antarctic con- 

 temporaneous vegetation was exactly similar in type, a good idea 

 can be obtained of the all-embracing scope of the Jurassic non-zonal 



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