Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/47

Rh "that the bay behind the barrier stretches past the South Pole and to the east of it as far as latitude 80°" is dangerous. All the evidence at our disposal from observations taken in the region of the Weddell Sea condemns the idea that there is "an arm of the sea through to Weddell's Sea." (Tidal Observations of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907. Sir G. Darwin.)

The question is a most intricate and difficult one, and cannot be properly solved until one or more expeditions set themselves to work in definitely making examinations of the ice of the different layers of the barriers, of the different layers of the bergs that have been shed from them, and various detailed measurements, and, what is perhaps as important as anything, the demarcation of the exact extent of these barriers, and a detailed survey of their surface as regards level. From the information we have at hand, it is very difficult to assert with certainty that the altitude of the Ross Barrier, when it emerges into the Ross Sea, is exactly the same as it is in 84° S., in the vicinity of the Beardmore Glacier.

It can be imagined that bergs of almost any length might be broken off from such a barrier as the Ross Barrier, and, as a matter of fact, bergs of enormous size have been recorded by many voyagers to the South Seas. Even