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Updated: May 23, 2025
When the instructions for this attempt to free the Discovery were drawn up, there had been, of course, no telling how broad the ice-sheet would be when operations began, and Scott had been obliged to assume that it would be nearly the same as in the previous year, when the open water had extended to the Dellbridge Islets about eleven miles from the ship.
But as the snow-fall diminished, and the climate became milder, this upper part of the ice-sheet was also in turn separated into smaller distinct glaciers, and these again into still smaller ones, while at the same time all were growing shorter and shallower, though fluctuations of the climate now and then occurred that brought their receding ends to a standstill, or even enabled them to advance for a few tens or hundreds of years.
Reviewing the various methods of calculation, Professor Chamberlin concludes that the time of the first spread of the ice-sheet is quite unknown, the second and greatest extension of the glaciation may have been between 300,000 and a million years ago, and the last ice-extension from 20,000 to 60,000 years ago; but he himself attaches "very little value" to the figures.
Furthermore, because it is distributed along the lower portion of the range, which was the first to be left bare on the breaking up of the ice-sheet at the close of the glacial winter, the soil it is growing upon has been longer exposed to post-glacial weathering, and consequently is in a more crumbling, decayed condition than the fresher soils farther up the range, and therefore offers a less secure anchorage for the roots.
It is fronted by an undulating barrier, the van of a mighty ice-sheet that is being forced outward from the high interior of the Antarctic Continent and apparently is sweeping over low hills, plains, and shallow seas as the great Arctic ice-sheet once pressed over Northern Europe. The barrier surface, seen from the sea, is of a faint golden brown colour.
Then there were the ice caves and grottos which were formed in the grounded icebergs that had overturned before we came, and the still more wonderful caves in the ice-sheet where it over-rode Ross Island and formed a cliff-face between Cape Evans and Glacier Tongue, extraordinarily like the white chalk cliffs of Studland Bay I found them, with here and there outstanding pinnacles which a little imagination would liken to Old Harry Rocks when the gray light was on them.
From its first stress emerges the primeval savage of the early part of the Old Stone Age, still bearing the deep imprint of his origin, surpassing his fellow-animals only in the use of crude stone implements. Then the stress of conditions relaxes the great ice-sheet disappears and again during a vast period he makes very little progress. The stress returns.
Whenever he was away from home in the winter he would see one of his younger brothers slipping down the shore ice and going under the ice-sheet, and he would break into a cold sweat at the idea. This shows just the worrying kind of boy Frank was; and it shows how used he was to having care put upon him, and how he would even borrow trouble when he had none.
He could thus better compare the differences between the two walls of the Strait. The fact that the northern wall is more evenly worn, more rounded than the southern, had a special significance for him, as corresponding with like facts in Switzerland, and showing that the ice-sheet had advanced across the Strait with greater force in its ascending than in its descending path.
We have already seen how the coming of the ice-sheet benefited the regions on the borders of the old Laurentian highland. This same benefit extended over practically the whole of what are now the prairies. Before the advent of the ice the whole section consisted of a broadly banded coastal plain much older than that of the Atlantic coast.
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