SOLIFLUCTION loi 



on its surface. As will be demonstrated by my map, the contours 

 of these vegetationless block- fields, with all their embranchments, 

 give the. rude outlines of a small river system, and, as has been men- 

 tioned already by Darwin and Thompson, in -many places the purl- 

 ing of running water is heard far down below under the blocks, 

 indicating the recent course of a stream in the depth of the stone- 

 river. 



But the real extent of the ancient flowing slopes is much larger 

 than that indicated by the open vegetationless block-fields. In 

 all places where running water has not washed away the fine mate- 

 rial the old detritus flows remain in their original composition and 

 offer a soil which is able to carry a covering of vegetation. Where 

 there is a small cut of any kind in such an unaltered part of the slope, 

 it is easy to recognize that the mass underneath the mantle of vege- 

 tation is the same as in the waste-streams on Stephens Peak, large 

 blocks imbedded in fine rock detritus. 



The large old stone-runs of the Falkland Islands evidently 

 were formed in a period of the past with a climate more severe than 

 the present, with heavy snowfalls in winter, but also with summers 

 characterized by active snow-melting, causing an intensive soli- 

 fluction which was ever victorious in the fight with the then poor 

 and scattered vegetation. I fancy that in these days the state of 

 the Falkland Islands was very much like that which I have actually 

 studied on the Bear Island of today. 



It is very inviting to 'connect this birthtime of the Falkland stone- 

 rivers with the great climatic depression of a bygone time that has 

 been demonstrated in the adjacent southern lands. 



In Tierra del Fuego and the south part of Patagonia Darwin, 

 Agassiz, and O. Nordenskjold have studied the moraines of an 

 old land-ice extending to the Atlantic Ocean, in South Georgia I 

 have traced a complete glaciation of the island, and in the Antarctic 

 region, in Graham Land, Arctowski, Nordenskjold, and myself 

 have found full evidence of an earlier, much larger extension of 

 glaciers and land-ice. 



To the west, east, and south the Falkland Islands are surrounded 

 by lands deeply furrowed by an old ice age. In our islands, on 

 the contrary, there are no traces of an old ice-sheet, no grooving 



