ANTARCTIC ADVENTURE AND RESEARCH 



broadly curved. Possibly the original fault planes are 

 better preserved in Antarctica than they would be along 

 a coast subjected to river and marine erosion. Most 

 of the capes around MacMurdo Sound stand out as 

 rounded headlands, generally fifty or one hundred feet 

 above the sea. In the vicinity of that curious ''desert" 

 locality, the lower Taylor Valley, the headlands are 

 free from snow or ice for a distance of several miles 

 from the sea, but as we proceeded north this bare area 

 became more and more restricted by the increase in the 

 width of the ice sheet behind. 



On the east side of MacMurdo Sound, Cape Royds 

 had a rocky hinterland which extended a mile from 

 the sea and three miles along the coast. In the lakes 

 in this hinterland the geologists of the 1907 expedi- 

 tion made many surprising discoveries of frozen but 

 living fresh water fauna and flora (see Figure 8). 

 Cape Evans was triangular in plan, each side being 

 about half a mile. It exhibited very interesting fea- 

 tures in the shape of debris cones from five to thirty 

 feet high, which were proved to be the erosion relics 

 of giant erratics. Cape Armitage promontory is about 

 nine miles long and one and a half miles wide, but only 

 about three miles of the southern end is partly free 

 from ice. Here were fine examples of solifliiction, usu- 

 ally in the form of pentagonal patches of gravel marked 

 out by narrow grooves, the patches being some twenty 

 feet across. Curious gullies ran around the slopes 

 near Hut Point, along the contours. They were prob- 

 ably due to peripheral streams flowing around the edge 

 of the Ross Ice Shelf, when it occupied successive posi- 



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