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V. 



GLACIAL FEATUEES IN SPITSBEEGEN IN EELATION TO 

 lEISH GEOLOGY. 



By GEENVILLE A. J. COLE, M.E.I.A., E.G.S., 

 Professor of Geology in the Eoyal College of Science for Ireland. 



Plates IX.-XVI. 



Eead May 8. Published July 29, 1911. 



Introduction. 



Under favourable summer conditions, the island-group of Spitsbergen is 

 accessible to excursion-steamers, and hundreds of visitors have thus become 

 generally acquainted with the aspect of a land where glacial features still 

 prevail. Few strangers, however, have experienced such advantages as were 

 offered by Professor Baron Gerard de Geer of Stockholm, in connexion with 

 the International Geological Congress of 1910 ; and hence I venture, as a 

 delegate to that Congress from the Eoyal College of Science for Ireland, to 

 present the following notes on some of the phenomena observed. The scale 

 of the landscapes in Spitsbergen, with mountains rising to heights of about 

 1,000 metres from the coast, with foregrounds of raised beaches and 

 fluvio-glacial fans, and with the glacial agents still at work, down to the very 

 shore-line, makes comparison with Ireland in the Ice Age apt and interesting, 

 The recent Ice Age, however, is passing in Spitsbergen, as it is in every part 

 of the world ; and we may there realize the conditions of our own islands 

 when the sea had again been admitted by subsidence to the fjords, while the 

 ice still occupied the lowlands in the form of broad coalescing glaciers, which 

 in places were beginning to stagnate. (PI. IX., fig 1.) 



Professor de Geer, through successive visits to Spitsbergen from 1896 

 to 1908, aided by a number of workers whom his enthusiasm has inspired, 

 has drawn up a detailed map of the great Ice Fjord and its ramifications. 

 On this the sea-depths are included, as determined by several thousand 

 soundings. This map was issued for the Geological Congress on a scale of 



E.I.A. PKOC, VOL. XXIX., SECT. B. [^-^] 



