chap, viii.] THE CAUSES OF GLACIAL EPOCHS. 
149 
Greenland is an anomaly in the northern hemisphere, only to 
be explained by the fact that cold currents from the polar area 
flow down both sides of it. In Eastern Asia we have the lofty 
Stanivoi Mountains in the same latitude as the southern part 
of Greenland, which, though their summits are covered with 
perpetual snow, give rise to no ice-sheet, and, apparently, even 
to no important glaciers ; — a fact undoubtedly connected with 
the warm Japan current flowing partially into the Sea of 
Okhotsk. So in North-west America we have the lofty coast 
range, culminating in Mt. St. Elias, nearly 15,000 feet high, and 
an extensive tract of high land to the north and north-west, with 
glaciers comparable in size with those of New Zealand, although 
situated in Lat. 60° instead of in Lat. 45°. Here, too, we have 
the main body of the Japan current turning east and south, and 
thus producing a mild climate, little inferior to that of Norway, 
warmed by the Gulf Stream. We thus have it made clear that 
could the two Arctic currents be diverted from Greenland, that 
country would become free from ice, and might even be com- 
pletely forest-clad and inhabitable ; while, if the Japan current 
were to be diverted from the coast of North America and a cold 
current come out of Behring’s Strait, the entire north-western 
extremity of America would even now become buried in ice. 
Now it is the opinion of the best American geologists that 
during the height of the glacial epoch North-eastern America 
was considerably elevated. 1 This elevation would bring the 
wide area of the banks of Newfoundland far above water, 
causing the American coast to stretch out in an immense curve 
to a point more than 600 miles east of Halifax ; and this would 
certainly divert much of the greatly reduced Gulf Stream straight 
across to the coast of Spain. The consequence of such a state 
of things would probably be that the southward flowing Arctic 
currents would be much reduced in velocity ; and the enormous 
quantity of icebergs continually produced by the ice-sheets of 
all the lands bordering the North Atlantic would hang about 
their shores and the adjacent seas, filling them with a dense 
ice-pack, far surpassing that of the Antarctic regions, and chilling 
the atmosphere so as to produce constant clouds and fog with 
1 Dana’s Manual of Geology, 2nd Edition, p. 540. 
