Prof. A. E. Nordensluold — Geology of Spitzbergen. 255 



of water, more or less, between it and the bottom of the rock- 

 basin. This circumstance seems to have been lost sight of. It 

 would be necessary for the ice to rise to a certain height above the 

 level of the outlet of the basin, in order to allow it to touch the 

 bottom anywhere ; and wherever it did so, it would be thawed by 

 contact with the rock, and so a continual circulation of water would be 

 kept up from even the deepest parts of the basin towards the outflow. 

 Hence, in addition to any abrading power which might be exercised 

 by the motion of the ice, through means of the stones and grit in it, 

 or between it and the rock, there would be a certain amount of 

 water action besides, carrying away at once all the minutely divided 

 particles, such as we now see to render glacial streams turbid, and 

 also hurrying through the channels where the contact of the ice and 

 rock was less close, and there exercising the ordinary abrading 

 power of water. 



It is not very easy to determine by what course the main volume 

 of water, which formed the sub-glacial river before it reached the 

 lake, would make its passage through it. If the height of the ice 

 above the outflow was so great, that the ice was kept pressing on the 

 bottom, the river must have found its channels along the sides of the 

 lake, thus tending to widen it. But if the thickness of the ice was 

 not sufficient for that, it would flow underneath. In any case, the 

 greater portion of the basin being occupied by ice, the water channels 

 must have been greatly confined, so that it is very probable that the 

 streams among the ice masses would have been sufficiently rapid to 

 have exercised an abrading power of their own. Besides this, if the 

 masses of ice were too lofty in proportion to the depth of the basin 

 to be floated, the water, when occasionally pounded back by them, 

 would force them along the bottom : reproducing on a small scale 

 the phenomena of a grounded ice-pack. At any rate, it appears that 

 the presence of this water ought greatly to modify the conditions 

 of all reasoning upon this interesting question. 



Y, — Sketch of the Geology of Ice Sound and Bell Sound, 



Spitzbergen. 



By Professor A. E. Nordenskiold, of Stockliolm ; 



For. Corr. Geol. Soc. Lond. 



Part IV. 



[Concluded from the March Number, page 127.) 

 VIII. Cretaceous Beds. — During our previous Expeditions we had 

 not fallen in with any strata belonging to this period on Spitzbergen ; 

 but in the beginning of the Expedition of 1872 I had the good 

 fortune to supply this missing link in the geology of Spitzbergen 

 through the very unexpected discovery, in the immediate neighbour- 

 hood of the Taxodium strata at Cape Staratschin, of fossil plants, 

 which had an unmistakable reference to the fossils which I brought 

 home some years ago from Kome in Greenland (Lower Cretaceous). 

 A closer examination by Professor Heer showed that this suppo- 

 sition was so far correct, inasmuch as the strata in question truly be- 



