Glacial Deluge.

Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 307, 7 January 1902, Page 4

Glacial Deluge.

We are momentarily threatened with q great glacial deluge. So says the eminent geologist, M. Leon Lewis, and lie claims to be no alarmist. Hi.,, latest work is entitled “The Great Glacial Deluge and its impending recurrence,” and in it he shows that the inevitable disruption of the fifty million cubic miles of ice which coup the South Pole must result in a wihl rush of the fragments, with all the waters which surround it, towards tin North Pole, by way of the Atlantic Ocean, one of the incidental effects tring thal we shall i;e ico-bmeni i

England. Not only, does the scientist say these disagreeable tilings, but, as though our sluggish flesh refused to creep at such suggestions of peril, !e cooliy invokes as proofs of his theories a host of remarkable and undoubted facts. The situation turns, it appears, upon alleged migrations and cataclysms of the ocean which have come again and again in the world’s history, and this awful natural phenom non •is aga.m due. Indeed, at any moment a cablegram from lv.'onte Video < .<•. -■ may tell us that the great glacial deluge is on its way northward lio ! There are no rains or thaws at the South Pole, so that all the snow that falis almost constantly is converted into s ce under pressure, and the whole mass thickens and widens constantly, despite the losses to which it is subjected by the breaking off of the immense tabular icebergs which have presented themselves to the notice of Lord Kelvin and all navigators in those regions. T.'ie waters of the surrounding seas are below the freezing point, as was first mooted by the famous circumnavi. gator, Captain Cook ; and hence there is a ccnstant accretion from this, scuta; to the vast hulk resulting from • he uiv onted snowfall. Ami now, what are the consequences of this state of things .* Why. during many thousands of years the so-called “ Antarctic Continent,’' or “icecap,” which is simply a huge mountain of ice. has been getting bigger and bigger until if is now as large as North America, and is estimated to possess a sunsec of eight million square miles. D- Cr.oli (“ Climate and Time ■’) and Mi' 1 j.L B. Morton (Popular Science Monthly, October, 1870) speak of it as being 2800 or 3000 miles in diameter. From a thickness of two or three miles at its edges the slope of this ice ccritiitrit ascends gradually to the cen:tre at the pole, where, it is estimated by Dr Croll and many others, the ice is at L ast twelve miles thick, and is more I'kciy fifteen or twenty. The total huh: of this great accumulation cannot be less than fifty 'million' cubic miles of ice.