The Coming Ice AgeTaber, C. A. M. (Charles Austin Mendell)
Science
The Coming Ice Age
Taber, C. A. M. (Charles Austin Mendell)
Glacial epoch
On the consummation of an ice period in the northern hemisphere heavy
glaciers covered the larger portion of its continents and islands,
which added so much weight to the northern lands as to attract the
waters of the southern oceans into the northern latitudes, as I have
before explained.
Thus, when the ice was mostly melted from the lands of the southern
hemisphere, the heavy ice-sheets that remained on the extensive
northern lands would still continue to attract the warm waters of the
southern seas into the northern oceans; and in this way the Japanese
and Gulf currents would gain a higher temperature and greater volume,
and thus add to their ability for melting the northern glaciers
wherever they were able to flow, and so hasten the growth of a mild era
in the northern hemisphere.
And it seems reasonable to suppose that there was more water in the
northern hemisphere on the ending of its ice period than at this age;
yet it appears that it was returned to the southern hemisphere during
a short period by the prevailing winds in the manner which I have
previously explained.
Therefore, there are but few traces of such flowage to be found in the
glacial drift, especially with the scarcity of marine life after the
rigor of a frigid age.
An article in _Science_, July 5, 1895, written by Agnes Crane, states
that Professor Joseph Prestwich has recently contributed a suggestive
memoir on this subject to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society. It treats of the evidence of a submergence of Western Europe
and the Mediterranean coasts at the close of the glacial period; and in
a previous paper communicated to the Geological Society of London, in
1892, the author gave evidence, deduced from personal observation, of
the submergence of the south of England not less than a thousand feet,
at the close of the glacial epoch.
Since that time the flood of water which flowed all of the low lands
of the high northern latitudes has been returned to the southern seas,
because of the force of the prevailing winds in connection with the
great oceans which open so widely toward the south, the force of the
winds being assisted through the attraction caused by the difference
of temperature in the surface waters of the vast southern temperate
oceans and the antarctic seas, and in this manner bringing about the
geographical conditions of to-day which favor the return of another ice
age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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