Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and GravelDonnelly, Ignatius
Science
Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Comets; Drift
Let us see: One of the coldest regions of the earth is Siberia. It is
a vast tract reaching to the Arctic Circle; it is the north part of
the Continent of Asia; it is intersected by great mountain-ranges.
Here, if anywhere, we should find the Drift; here, if anywhere, was
the ice-field, "the sea of ice." It is more elevated and more
mountainous than the interior of North America where the
drift-deposits are extensive; it is nearer the pole than New York and
Illinois, covered as these are with hundreds of feet of _débris_, and
yet _there is no Drift in Siberia!_
I quote from a high authority, and a firm believer in the theory that
glaciers or ice-sheets caused the drift; James Geikie says:
"It is remarkable that _nowhere in the great plains of Siberia do any
traces of glacial action appear to have_
{p. 29}
_been observed._ If cones and mounds of gravel and great erratics
like those that sprinkle so wide an area in Northern America and
Northern Europe had occurred, they would hardly have failed to arrest
the attention of explorers. Middendorff does, indeed, mention the
occurrence of trains of large erratics which he observed along the
banks of some of the rivers, but these, he has no doubt, were carried
down by river-ice. The general character of the 'tundras' is that of
wide, flat plains, covered for the most part with a grassy and mossy
vegetation, but here and there bare and sandy. Frequently nothing
intervenes to break the monotony of the landscape. . . . It would
appear, then, that ill Northern Asia representatives of the glacial
deposits which are met with in similar latitudes in Europe and
America _do not occur_. The northern drift of Russia and Germany; the
åsar of Sweden; the kames, eskers, and erratics of Britain; and the
iceberg-drift of Northern America have, apparently, no equivalent in
Siberia. Consequently we find the great river-deposits, with their
mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in
those high latitudes, still lying _undisturbed at the surface_."[1]
Think of the significance of all this. There is no Drift in Siberia;
no "till," no "bowlder-clay," no stratified masses of gravel, sand,
and stones. There was, then, no Drift age in all Northern Asia, _up
to the Arctic Circle!_
How pregnant is this admission. It demolishes at one blow the whole
theory that the Drift came of the ice. For surely if we could expect
to find ice, during the so-called Glacial age, anywhere on the face
of our planet, it would be in Siberia. But, if there was an ice-sheet
there, it did not grind up the rocks; it did not striate them; it did
not roll the fragments into bowlders and pebbles; it rested so
quietly on the face of the land that, as Geikie tells us, the
pre-glacial deposits throughout Siberia, with their mammalian
remains, are still found "_lying undisturbed_
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 460, published in 1873.]
{p. 30}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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