94 J- G. ANDERSSON 



ditions are favorable for its development. But it seems to me that 

 there has been a tendency to depreciate its importance as a link 

 in the series of denudative agents, and to look at it as only a curi- 

 osity of mere local nature. No one, as far as I know, has collected 

 the scattered material, as I will try to do in the following pages, 

 and probably few have had an opportunity like mine to study the 

 phenomenon in its fullest development. 



SOLIFLUCTION IN BEAR ISLAND 



This islet situated in 74^° N. L., in the Atlantic part of the 

 Arctic Ocean, is a small remainder of a once larger stretch of land. 

 Sea cliffs, in some places rising to the height of 400 meters and 

 fringing the island almost all around, tell us of the destructive action 

 of the abrasion. The northern and larger part of the island forms 

 a lowland plateau rising very slowly from the recent coastal out- 

 line to the interior and cut out through slightly dislocated Devonian 

 and Carboniferous beds. Several reasons, among others the occur- 

 rence of old, somewhat obliterated coastal cliffs at the inner margin 

 of this plateau, incline me to consider it as worked out by marine 

 abrasion. 



The southern part of the island is mountainous, with tops rising 

 to 460-539 meters. In this region the ground is composed of a 

 great variety of sedimentary rocks from Silurian to Triassic age, 

 and the older strata are cut up by vertical dislocations into a few 

 parallel blocks. In some cases the denudation has laid bare parts 

 of the precipitous surfaces of the faults, but as a rule the land- 

 sculpturing agents show a marked tendency to smooth the tilted 

 blocks to rounded hills and broad river valleys with gentle slopes. 

 Thus the land forms of the interior of the island are in a striking 

 contrast to the perpendicular cliffs on the sea side. 



On the hill-slopes and valley sides of Bear Island there are almost 

 everywhere clear indications of a moving of the waste from higher 

 to lower ground. Many of the small hills show a ver}^ marked 

 streakiness of surface, which is due to the peculiar arrangement 

 of the detritus; sometimes the flowing soil forms real streams which 

 have much likeness to a glacier in miniature, and often in the depres- 

 sions between the hills there are numerous small circular or semi- 



