Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/79

Rh Arctic explorers, holds that it is probable that the interior of Greenland is itself verdant in summer, and is at this moment preparing to attempt to reach this interior oasis. Nor is it difficult, with the aid of the facts cited by Woeickoff and Whitney, to perceive the cause of the exceptional condition of Greenland. To give ice and snow in large quantities, two conditions are required—first, atmospheric humidity; and, secondly, cold precipitating regions. Both of these conditions meet in Greenland. Its high coast-ranges receive and condense the humidity from the sea on both sides of it and to the south. Hence the vast accumulation of its coast snow-fields, and the intense discharge of the glaciers emptying out of its valleys. When extreme glacialists point to Greenland, and ask us to believe that in the glacial age the whole continent of North America as far south as the latitude of 40° was covered with a continental glacier, in some places several thousands of feet thick, we may well ask, first, what evidence there is that Greenland, or even the Antarctic Continent, at present shows such a condition; and, secondly, whether there exists a possibility that the interior of a great continent could ever receive so large an amount of precipitation as that required. So far as present knowledge exists, it is certain that the meteorologist and the physicist must answer both questions in the negative. In short, perpetual snow and glaciers must be local, and can not be continental, because of the vast amount of evaporation and condensation required. These can only be possible where comparatively warm seas supply moisture to cold and elevated land; and this supply can not, in the nature of things, penetrate far inland. The actual condition of interior Asia and interior America in the higher northern latitudes affords positive proof of this. In a state of partial submergence of our northern continents, we can readily imagine glaciation by the combined action of local glaciers and great ice-floes; but, in whatever way the phenomena of the bowlder clay and of the so-called terminal moraines are to be accounted for, the theory of a continuous continental glacier must be given up.

I can not better indicate the general bearing of facts, as they present themselves to my mind in connection with this subject, than by referring to a paper by Dr. G. M. Dawson on the distribution of drift over the great Canadian plains east of the Rocky Mountains. I am the more inclined to refer to this, because of its recency, and because I have so often repeated similar conclusions as to Eastern Canada and the region of the Great Lakes.

The great interior plain of Western Canada, between the Laurentian axis on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west, is seven hundred miles in breadth, and is covered with glacial drift, presenting one of the greatest examples of this deposit in the world.