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Updated: May 23, 2025
Than a dark streak cut its way into the solid sheet that remained and carved out another, to feed the broad stream of pack which was hurrying away to the north-west. The wind had fallen to a calm, and not a sound disturbed the stillness about us. Yet, in the midst of this peaceful silence, was an awful unseen agency rending that great ice-sheet as though it had been none but the thinnest paper.
I had hopes of a castaway-gadget coming up, but it hasn't." He began to assemble the device which would substitute for the larger, heavier, much more massive apparatus he'd destroyed on the Antarctic ice-sheet. The work went swiftly. Soames had re-designed the outfit, and a man can always build a thing of his own design more easily than something from another man's drawings.
Erosion of another kind was to succeed, and to produce more lasting effects on the configuration of the surface. On the disappearance of the ice-sheet, an epoch characterised by milder conditions of climate set in.
Off the great Malaspina Glacier in Alaska the ocean is tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty miles from the shores. Very few country people, even among the educated, are ready to believe that this enormous ice-sheet ever existed.
The sun was due to depart before the end of April, and so no time could be wasted if the outside work, which had been delayed by the tardy formation of the ice-sheet, was to be completed before the daylight vanished. One of the most urgent operations was to get up the meteorological screen, which had been made under the superintendence of Royds.
But we need not build up a theoretical case in order to form an approximate idea of the great ice-sheet stretching over the northern part of this continent during the glacial period. It would seem that man was intended to decipher the past history of his home, for some remnants or traces of all its great events are left as a key to the whole.
Were the flights of all the ouzels in the Sierra traced on a chart, they would indicate the direction of the flow of the entire system of ancient glaciers, from about the period of the breaking up of the ice-sheet until near the close of the glacial winter; because the streams which the ouzels so rigidly follow are, with the unimportant exceptions of a few side tributaries, all flowing in channels eroded for them out of the solid flank of the range by the vanished glaciers, the streams tracing the ancient glaciers, the ouzels tracing the streams.
For many thousand years, with occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheet brooded, silent and grim, over the face of the two continents. Life was extinct as far south as the latitude of New York and London. No plant or animal survived the general freezing. Not a creature broke the monotony of that endless glacial desert.
I looked down a sheer precipice to a chaos of crumpled ice 1500 ft. below. There was no way down for us. The country to the east was a great snow upland, sloping upwards for a distance of seven or eight miles to a height of over 4000 ft. To the north it fell away steeply in glaciers into the bays, and to the south it was broken by huge outfalls from the inland ice-sheet.
High peaks, impassable cliffs, steep snow-slopes, and sharply descending glaciers were prominent features in all directions, with stretches of snow-plain over laying the ice-sheet of the interior. The slope we were ascending mounted to a ridge and our course lay direct to the top.
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