1604 The American Geologist. March, 1902 
Iceland and Jan Mayen, of fossil shallow water mollusca of 
the arctic Yoldia fauna, dredged at depths of 1,000 to 1,333 
fathoms, or 6,000 to 8,000 feet. As the Norwegian fathom 
and foot slightly exceed these measures of English usage, it 
appears that this region of the sea bed, presumably with the 
contiguous land areas to such extent as to form a large tract 
of the earth crust, “must have been uplifted at least 2600 
metres higher than it is at present.” . 
Dr. Frithjof Nansen, discussing this hypothesis, concludes 
that transportation of these shallow water shells by floating ice 
in floes or bergs to be dropped from them to these great depths 
of the sea is extremely improbable. “If so,” writes Brogger, 
“no other explanation is left than the supposition of a former 
uplift of the sea bottom.” 
The elevation which may be thence inferred for Scandi- 
navia before and during the accumulation of the ice-sheet 
would permit stream erosion of its many long, irregular, and 
branching fjords. The longest and deepest, the Sogne fjord, 
extending inland in a devious course more than a hundred 
miles, has a sounding of 4,080 feet near the middle of its 
course. At the mouth of Aurlands fjord, seventy-five miles 
from the outer coast, its depth is 3,875 feet; and this southern 
branch fjord, sixteen miles long and about one mile wide, 
lying between precipitous rock walls 3,000 to 4,000 feet high, 
has a depth of 1,535 feet at the mouth of its magnificent trib- 
utary, the Nero fjord, which is about ten miles long and varies 
in width from a tenth to three-fifths of a mile. These 
and the other abundant fjords of Norway seem to me to have 
been eroded by rivers to nearly their present depth when the 
land stood thousands of feet above its present hight. 
Brégger shows that the Drammen fjord, which he specially 
studied, was made shallow in its outer or coastal part by 
deposition of glacial and modified drift, chiefly during the clos- 
ing Champlain epoch of the Ice age, attended by the formation 
of marginal moraines, while its deep inland course was still 
filled with ice, and that this inner part of the fjord was left 
nearly free of drift when that ice melted. Another reason for 
the usual deepening of the fjords as they are followed inland 
may be a greater preglacial uplift of the inner part of the 
country than of the coast, accounting, with drift deposition as 
