THE VALUE OF ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION 



the later phases were contemporaneous with important 

 human populations. Moreover, the effects of the ice 

 ages concern practically every dweller in the United 

 States, in Canada, in Britain, and in north and central 

 Europe. For instance, the environments of the 

 Canadian wheat fields, the Great Lakes, the rivers and 

 canals and scenery of the northeastern United States, 

 the whole topography of Alpine countries, the routes 

 of the transcontinental railways in Europe, the actual 

 settlement in the deep valleys of Switzerland — all these 

 features depend almost entirely on the phenomena of 

 the Great Ice Age. We cannot now study what these 

 lands were like during the period of maximum glacia- 

 tion, but it was an attempt to solve in part this set of 

 problems which led the writer to become a member of 

 the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910. For sev- 

 eral years he had been investigating the post-glacial 

 scenery of the European Alps, but here it is very dif- 

 ficult to decide how much of the scenery is due to past 

 ice action and how much to the action of rivers and 

 streams of post-glacial origin. In the Antarctic I 

 was so fortunate as to find ice- free valleys where all 

 the features of the Swiss topography were displayed 

 without the obliterating effects of many thousand years 

 of rains and rivers. 



In the realm of geology there are similar reasons 

 why Antarctica should be closely surveyed. The two 

 regions fairly well known at present belong to two 

 differing provinces. In the Australian quadrant around 

 the Ross Sea the rocks and structures are quite re- 

 markably like those of Australia. They consist es- 



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