204 WARREN UPHAM, ESQ.^ ON CAUSES OF THE ICE AGE. 



tains of Scandinavia, whence the ice moved west and north 

 into the Atlantic, southward over northern Germany, and 

 eastward over a large part of Russia. Smaller ice-sheets 

 Avere formed upon Scotland and Ireland, and these hecame 

 confluent Avith each other and with the Scandinavian ice 

 which crossed the present bed of the shallow North Sea to 

 the borders of Great Britain. Glaciers also were far more 

 extensive than noAv in the Alps, Pyrenees, Caucasus, and 

 Himalayas ; but no large portion of Asia is known to have 

 been overspread by ice. A most remarkable feature of the 

 accumulation of the ice-sheets was their absence fi'om Siberia 

 and northern Alaska, while so heavily massed in the same 

 and more southern latitudes of Biitish America, the northern 

 United States, the British Isles, and north-western Europe. 



6 In the southern hemisphere, at about the same time with 

 the northern glaciation, but whether alternating or contem- 

 poraneous with it we cannot know, a similar but less exten- 

 sive sheet of hxnd-ice covered Patagonia, and the mountains 

 and highlands of the middle island of New -Zealand bore 

 immense glaciers far exceeding their still magnificent 

 remnants of the present day. 



7 The Ice age yet lingers upon the Antarctic continent, as 

 also in Greenland, and to less degree in the St. Elias region 

 of Alaska and British America, and in Norway. Land-ice 

 surrounds the south pole to a distance of 12° to 25° from 

 it, covering, according to Sir Wyville Thomson, about 

 4.500,000 square miles. Its area is thus slightly greater 

 than that of the Pleistocene ice-sheet of North America. 

 Whether the Antarctic ice covered an equal or greater extent 

 in the Pleistocene period, contemporaneous with the glacia- 

 tion of now temperate regions, we have no means of knowing. 

 Along a portion of its border of perpendicular ice-cliffs, Sir 

 J. C. Ross sailed 450 miles, finding only one point low 

 enough to allow the upper surface of the ice to be viewed 

 from the masthead. There it was a smooth plain of snowy 

 whiteness, extending as far as the eye could see. That this 

 ice-plain has a considerable slope from its central portions 

 toward its boundary is shown by its abundant outflow into 

 the sea, b}^ which its advancing edge is uplifted and broken 

 into multitudes of bergs, many of them tabular, having 

 broad, nearly flat, tops. As described by Moseley in A-otes of 

 a Naturalist on the " Challenger," these bergs give strange 

 beauty, sublimity and peril to the Antarctic ocean, upon 

 which they float away northward until they are melted. 



