THE ICE AGE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9087, 12 May 1908, Page 3

THE ICE AGE.

The peculiar scratching, polishing, and erosion of rocks, the existence tf moraines, and other evidence, prove (writes Sir Rny Lankester) that enormous glaciers covered the north of Europe, that England and Scotland were in large part covered by a great ice-sheet or glacier, and that the great valleys of Switzerland, such as the Rhone Valley and the bas'n of the La'ce (if Geneva, were tilled by enormous glaciers, which helped to mould and deepen the valleys. The present glaciers are truly the remnants or rootlets of those enormous masses of the glacial epoch. On such of the land surface as was not then covered by ice existed the hairy elephant, or Siberian mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, wild cattle, lions, bears, hyenas, and other animals now extinct in this part of the world. Man had made his appearance, hunted these animals, and lived in caves. His weapons and carvings and their bones tell us the story in no uncertain tarms. The biggest Swiss glaciers of to-day, compared to the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, of which they are but the highest tributaries, still surviving uumelted among the mountain-tops, are in size an a -mountain^ I .'eshet is to the .great stream of Loch Lomond or as the Serpentine in Hyde Park to the neighbouring Thames. Vast as was the great glacier of the Rhone Valley and immanae as has been tlv* work done by water and ice in carving this great highway in the mountain mass of Switzerland it hr,s all been effected since the date of the formation ,on ths sea-bottofn and the subsequent I elevation of the Strata which we call j "the chalk"—a deposit which comes not very far down in the series of I strata of the earth's crust. Only, 3,000 ft of deposit exist above it whilst below it are more than 60,000 feet of water-deposited or "sedimen • tary" rocks. The huge Alps have risen since the date of the "'chalk," for we find strata containing marine shells'of the Tertiary period at a. height of 10,000 ft in those mountains. Where • tho3e shells now are was the bottom of the sea at a comparatively recent date, probably not more than fifty million years ago! And not only have the Alps been raised since then from th 3 sea level to 15,000 ft (the height of Mont Blanc), but the huge mountain valleys and the great chasm of tho Rho;io Valley many WilOS Wide, with its floor thousands of feet below trie rr.oantain ridges have been scoured out. Deeper and widsr it has gradually become k as it has taken shape, whilst the mountain sides have been removed first by water and later by ice—by the great glacier, consisting of solidice, miles wide and a thousand and|more feet in thickness. The water no longer fills the valley in solid form,' but once again rushes along as an irresistible torrent, tearing and wearing the rock without rest or mercy, carrying it off by thousands of tons day by day, year by year, to the plains of Provence and the deep floor of the Mediterranean Sea.