There is one serious objection to Zeuner’s theory. Two of the three
movements of the earth on which it is based would have reduced the
warmth of summer in the northern hemisphere, but they would at the same
time have increased the temperature of the southern hemisphere, thus
alternating glaciation in the two hemispheres. Unfortunately, it is
fairly well established that glaciers north and south of the equator
have waxed and waned at the same time over a considerable number of
years.
It is not enough, of course, to find the cause of the individual
glaciations. There must be a cause for the glacial period as a whole.
The Great Ice Age was an almost unique event in the history of the
earth. We have to go back 200,000,000 years, to the time of the reptiles
that preceded the dinosaurs, before we come again on major glaciations.
Zeuner states frankly that the astronomic theory “does not provide the
cause of the Ice Age” as a whole.[11] Some added factor must be found.
One which he considers is a migration of the north pole from the
direction of the Pacific to its present location; Zeuner and others
think the movement occurred before the Great Ice Age.
Two geologists, Maurice Ewing and William L. Donn, have accounted for
the beginning of the Ice Age by accepting the theory that the north and
south poles had moved from the north Pacific and the south Atlantic to
their present positions. They account rather ingeniously for the advance
and the retreat of the four glaciations. With the north pole where it is
now, the ice-free Arctic Ocean would supply moisture by evaporation.
This moisture, owing to cold over the northern areas of Asia and North
America, would fall as snow to nourish glaciers. But how to stop this
process and reverse it? It happens that the sea floor forms a rather
high sill between the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans. When the sea level
dropped, as its water piled up in the great glaciers, the sill came too
close to the surface to allow much of the warmer water from the Atlantic
to reach the Arctic Ocean and to keep it from freezing over. Once the
ice pack formed, evaporation diminished abruptly. The glaciers lost
their nourishment. The summer melt returned their waters to the ocean.
Sea level rose. The currents from the Atlantic could flow over the sill
again and melt the ice pack. Then conditions would be ripe for a second
advance of snow and ice across the northern world. The shallow waters of
Bering Strait probably had little effect upon the Arctic Ocean.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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