934 
because “the currents carrying moisture move in from all 
directions towards the pole.” 
Forty years ago a mean height of 2000 m for Ant- 
arctica was deduced by Meinardus [106], since the 
annual variation in the amount of air over the rest of the 
world, as computed from mean station pressure values, 
would be just compensated if the entire surface inside 
the Antarctic Circle were 1350 m above sea level; if one- 
third the area inside the circle is at sea level, the rest 
must be at 2000 m—a value which has been used ex- 
tensively and uncritically by geographers, geologists, 
and others. Using the same pressures but different 
antarctic mean surface and free-air temperatures, Simp- 
son [112] obtaimed an average height of only 852 m, 
which he considered just as plausible as 1350; Meinardus’ 
recomputation [109] for the area inside the circle, based 
on later data, was 1500 m, and for the continent, 
2200 m. 
Meanwhile, the altitude of the snow surface at the 
Pole itself was found by Simpson [112], from exhaustive 
study of Amundsen’s and Scott’s barometric readings, 
to be 9172 ft or 2.8 km, 700 ft lower than the ice divide 
crossed by both explorers at 88°30’S, some 200 miles 
back of the crests of the Queen Maud Mountains which 
form the south side of the Ross Sea. A similar ridge was 
found behind the Admiralty Range on the west side of 
the Ross Sea. 
The German Schwabenland expedition in 1939 found 
a new chain of east-west mountaims athwart the 
Greenwich meridian about 250 miles inland. Behind 
this range, which stretches at least 500 miles and has 
peaks up to 4 km, the ice surface rises even higher. 
Herrmann [126] offered an antarctic cross section along 
the 0°-180° meridian, showing a trough between these 
mountains and the Queen Mauds, with 1 to 2 km of ice 
in the trough so that the highest point, at 80°S, is 
more than 5 km above sea level, and the lowest point of 
the snow surface is 3 km m.s.l., at the Pole. This range, 
extending along 80°S eastward to at least 20°, the 
limit of German exploration, may be a continuation 
of one postulated’ by Lamb [81] to explain the apparent 
behavior of weather along Antarctica’s Indian Ocean 
coast, and which he found “for my meteorological pur- 
poses. . .was a satisfactory working assumption”’: 
The whole trend of recurving depression tracks, both from 
the Ross Sea-Wilkes Land sector and in the Indian Ocean 
6. An earlier geographic postulation from meteorological 
evidence proved unfortunate: ‘‘Before the Scotia had left the 
Antarctic Seas, Mr. Mossman was able to demonstrate meteor- 
ologically the existence of the land reported by Johnson and 
Morrell, extending northward to about 65°S at 44°W,” largely 
by the coldness of SW winds at Laurie Island. ‘‘Since that time, 
with the additional data furnished by the Scotia Bay Station 
during eight years, it has become more than ever certain that 
New South Greenland, as Johnson called it, really exists.’ 
Within a year after Dr. W. S. Bruce wrote thus in Polar Ex- 
ploration (New York & London, 1911), Dr. Wilhelm Filchner 
sledged 40 miles from the beset Deutschland and found no 
bottom at 600 fathoms where New South Greenland was post- 
ulated; three years later Shackleton’s Hndurance drifted across 
the supposed land area and finally sank in the middle of it. 
POLAR METEOROLOGY 
sector,. . lend support to the belief in a topographical barrier 
in the interior of the continent of similar order of magnitude 
to the Alps or Rocky Mountains, say 12,000 to 15,000 feet 
in height. There is no evidence to suggest how far the barrier 
may extend west and south-west beyond 80°S, 80°E, nor 
whether it may be a great range of mountains or the main 
crest of the antarctic ice-cap. Nor can one say whether its 
crest presents an unbroken contour or is interrupted; but I 
think its north-eastern end is likely to be nearer 70°S and 97° 
to 100°H than at the coast itself. ... The principal south polar 
anticyclones tend to take up positions centered. . near the 
line of this supposed summit and show signs of dividing across 
it when they decay... . Very occasionally a depression moved 
right across the ice-cap on one side or other of the line of this 
supposed barrier, but probably never crossed it. 
The Schwabenland findings, Manley pointed out [12], 
“‘oo far to alter the simple concept of an antarctic dome 
more or less symmetrical about the pole.” Similarly, the 
chain of east-west mountains found by Operation High- 
jump along 76°S from 110° to 140°W have one peak 
some 6 km high, although the Hollick-Kenyon Plateau 
behind them, on which Ellsworth landed, is less than 
2 km high. Thus recent exploration has generally in- 
validated the simple model of a high Hast Antarctica 
plateau and a low West Antarctica plain, the model on 
which Simpson based his theory of antarctic weather 
processes. 
Even more important, if there is no central dome to 
the ice cap, but instead a central trough or basin, then 
“the greatest problem of the antarctic anticyclone, 
namely, the origin of the precipitation within the anti- 
cyclone,” as Simpson put it, disappears. Instead, the 
continental interior is an area of little or no precipita- 
tion, which can well have a perpetual anticyclonic 
regime, as long as the circulation provides snowfall up 
to the observed ice crest. 
Recession. Even this peripheral snowfall need not 
equal the annual ice outflow, because Antarctica’s pres- 
ent ice is merely “‘the remains of the Pleistocene glacial 
ice-sheet and. ..at present a complete recession is taking 
place.” (The rapidity and course of this recession are 
major problems of the present Norwegian-British-Swe- 
dish expedition.) Although in his Handbuch monograph 
[14] Meinardus assumed climatic equilibrium in esti- 
mating Antarctica’s precipitation, his earlier study [108] 
pointed out that equilibrium probably does not obtain. 
There he concluded ‘‘that Antarctica during the ice age 
had, in association with an imcreased air circulation, 
higher temperatures, augmented water vapor turnover, 
greater precipitation, and greater evaporation.” Higher 
antarctic temperatures arose chiefly from increased cir- 
culation, so that elsewhere temperatures were lowered, 
but whether ‘increased precipitation or lowered tem- 
peratures [were] the primary cause of glaciation” in 
lower latitudes was uncertain. 
Manley’s mechanism for the original glaciation of 
Antarctica [12] starts with a relatively ice-free continent 
surrounded by seas without permanent ice, so that the 
resulting heavy precipitation along the coasts, and par- 
ticularly in the mountains adjacent to the Ross and 
Weddell Seas, would cause glaciation. Outflow glaciers 
would so chill these seas that their present ice sheets 
