200 HOBBS— ROLE OF GLACIAL ANTICYCLONE [April 24, 



Wegener. They report almost continual storms in all save the 

 highest section of their journey, the wind descending the slopes and 

 filling the air with drift snow. Within the marginal portions of 

 their section, it was established that the finely granular surface layer 

 of snow is joined abruptly to a more coarsely crystalline subjacent 

 layer and corresponds to the annual deposit. This layer was by a 

 series of measurements shown to vary in thickness from 20 cm., or 

 about eight inches, in the central portion, to one half meter (or 

 about two and a half times that thickness) near the east coast, and a 

 meter (or five times this thickness) near the west coast. Schemat- 

 ically represented with grossly exaggerated scales, this distribution 

 is expressed in Fig. 5. It was further determined that the snow 



Fig. 5. Diagram to illustrate the marginal thickening of annual snow 

 deposit upon the Greenland continental glacier due to drifting on radial lines. 



deposit at Borg, the winter station upon the inland-ice though rel- 

 atively near its margin, was less than on the coast to the eastward.^* 

 Still more recently has appeared the preliminary report of 

 Mawson upon the Australasian Antarctic expedition, in which he 

 tells us that at the winter station on the margin of the inland-ice, 

 the winds which blew down slope and ofif shore raised " a sea of 

 drifting snow which poured fluid-thick over the landscape." 



" For months the drifting snow never ceased, and intervals of many days 

 together passed when it was impossible to see one's hand held at arm's 

 length. The dri£t snow became charged with electricity and in the darkness 

 of the winter night all pointed objects and often one's clothes, nose, and 

 finger tips glowed with the pale blue light of St. Elmo's fire. . . . Such 

 weather lasted almost nine months of the year. Even in the height of sum- 

 mer, blizzard followed blizzard in rapid succession. "^s 



Where tongues of ice extended out to sea from the shore, snow 

 collected upon them though the marginal slopes were swept free of 

 it by the force of the blizzard.^^ 



2* A. Wegener, " Vorl^figer Bericht iiber die wissenschaftlichen Ergeb- 

 nisse der Expedition," Zeitsch. d. Gcsell. f. Erdkunde s. Berlin, 1914. 



25 Sir Douglas Mawson, "Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-14," 

 Geogr. Jour., Vol. 44, 1914, pp. 269. 



26 Mawson, " The Home of the Blizzard," 1915, Vol. 2, p. 2:2i- 



