NEW ICE AGE

Hokitika Guardian, 16 November 1931, Page 2

NEW ICE AGE

PREDICTION BY AMERICAN. A large part of North America again may become uninhabitable because of the advance of a gigantic ice sheet, .‘according to Dr 'W. C. Alden, glacial geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. ‘Most of us probably think of the glacial period as having ended ten or twenty thousand years ago,” Dr Alden says in a report of the National Research Council on a , co-operative project for finding traces of ancient man in America. “Yet there are thousands of mountain glaciers. The Antarctic is even now ( shrouded in about 5,000,000 square miles of ice and the ice cap on Greenland is estimated as over 700,000 square miles in extent. ■ It is quite likely that the 'inhabitants of Canada and the Upper Mississippi Valley may some time be driven southward before the irresistible advance of another continental ice sheet.”

The ancient ice sheets, Dr Alden told the National Research Council committee, appear to have had three main accumulation centres, where, through thousands of years, the ice was massed until it was able to move southward. One was on the Labrador peninsula, one in the region directly west of Hudson ■Bay, and the other directly south-west. ■Once under way nothing could stop them, he pointed out. j “All the mountain peaks of New .England were overridden by the ice and probably all those of the Adirondacks, he said. “In the west another great ice sheets crept inexorably over the Canadian line. At the maximum stages, ice thousands of feet thick reaches about to the line of the Ohio and Missouri ißivers.

These two great rivers owe their- present courses to the diversion of the water about the margins of the great ice sheets. Were ice to readvance in the future.' the works of man would be demolished and abundant 1 evidence of.h’s occupancy of the area, would be buried in the drift.” /