OSCILLATIONS IN SCANDINAVIA, 511 



and fragmeiats of shells in glacially transported deposits, is shown by Belt, 

 Goodchild, Lewis, Kendall, and others, to be untenable. Indeed, these 

 fossils, not lying- in the place where they were living, give no proof of any 

 depression of the land, since they have been brought by currents of the ice- 

 sheet moving across the bed of the 'Irish Sea. But it is clearly known by 

 other evidence, as raised beaches and fossiliferous marine sediments, that 

 large portions of Great Britain and Ireland were slightly depressed under 

 their burden of ice, and have been since uplifted to a vertical extent rang- 

 ing probably up to a maximum of about 300 feet. 



In Scandinavia the valuable observations and studies of Barou Gerard 

 de Gear, of the Geological Survey of Sweden, have supplied lines of equal 

 depression of the land at the time of the melting away of the ice.^ This 

 region of greatest thickness of the European ice-sheet is found to have 

 been depi'essed to an increasing extent from the outer portions toward the 

 interior. The lowest limit of the submergence, at the southern extremity 

 of Sweden, is no more than 70 feet above the present sea-level, and in 

 northeastern Denmark it diminishes to zero; but northward it increases to 

 an observed amount of about 800 feet on the west shore of the Gulf of 

 Bothnia, near latitude 63°. Along the coast of Norway it ranges from 200 

 feet to nearly 600 feet, excepting far northward, near the North Cape, 

 where it decreases to about 100 feet. In proportion with this observed 

 range of the subsidence on the coasts of Scandinavia, its amount in the 

 center of the country was probably 1,000 feet. 



A very interesting history of the postglacial oscillations of southern 

 Sweden has been also ascertained by Baron de Geer, which seems to be 

 closely like the postglacial earth movements of the northeastern border of 

 North America. As on our Atlantic coast, the uplift from the Champlain 

 submergence in that part of Sweden raised the country higher than now. 

 The extent of this uplift appears to have been about 100 feet on the area 

 between Denmark and Sweden, closing the entrance to the Baltic Sea, 

 which became for some time a great fresh-water lake. After this another 

 depression of that region ensued, opening a deeper passage into the Baltic 



' "Quaternary changes of level in Scandinavia," Bulletin, G. S. A., Vol. Ill, 1892, pp. 6.5-68, with 

 map of the late glacial marine area in southern Sweden. 



