EURASIA 193 



of the Pleistocene ice-sheet of North America. Suess himself suggests 

 this comparison in one of his later works, where he says : 



"One can also recognize a certain resemblance between these curved chains 

 [of Asia] and the course of the moraines, and also the forms of the glacier 

 lobes which Chamberlin draws across the east of the United States."^ 



Its periphery is made up of six or seven lesser mountain arcs joined 

 end to end in a curving course, so as to define the boundaries of the lobe. 

 On its base between the eastern end of the Himalaya and the Island of 

 Formosa this lobe is about 1,700 miles across, and from base to outer 

 extremity it measures about 2,500 miles. It is interesting to note that 

 the Malay earth-lobe presents certain well marked antitheses to the 

 Himalaya re-entrant, and that they are all dynamically normal. Corre- 

 sponding to a region of relatively free and partly dispersive crustal move- 

 ments, without obstructing masses, the peripheral ranges of the Malay 

 lobe have comparatively low altitudes, and further, corresponding to an 

 axis of more extensive and perhaps more rapid crustal movement, some 

 of these ranges show unusual volcanic activity. The Java arc in partic- 

 ular is a veritable fire line, and its relatively low mountain basement is 

 almost entirely covered up by volcanic products. Here, then, was the 

 relatively free spreading of a great earth-lobe, the thrust forces dying out 

 in dispersive movements, while in the more severely compressed and over- 

 heightened Himalaya and the Pamir we see the effects of crustal move- 

 ment retarded by a great and effectively resistant obstruction. 



There seems to be little doubt that the projection of this remarkable 

 earth-lobe so far to the south on a path lying next east of the Himalaya 

 is in some degree a compensation for the obstructing effect of India. 

 The advance of the crustal sheet in the region north of Indian was so 

 strongly retarded by the Indian mass that the force of the movement 

 against the Himalaya was partly deflected eastward into the Malay lobe. 

 In this way the thrust forces running south along the axis of the Malay 

 lobe were intensified and accelerated, just as a stream of water, meeting 

 an obstruction which fills half the width of its channel, is retarded and 

 slightly raised against the obstruction, only to rush with accelerated 

 velocity through the remaining constricted space. If there had been no 

 obstructing Indian peninsula, it seems likely that these two areas would 

 have been equalized, and that the front line of Asia would have run in a 

 broad curve sweeping from the east end of Arabia to Formosa, without, 

 in all probability, reaching farther south than the tenth degree of north 



•Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. 11, p. 105. 



