Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 93

CHAPTER VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS?

We come now to the theory which is at present most generally accepted :

It being apparent that glaciers were not adequate to produce the results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an extraordinary hypothesis—to wit, that the whole north and south regions of the globe, extending from the poles to 35° or 40° of north and south latitude, were, in the Drift age, covered with enormous, continuous sheets of ice, from one mile thick at its southern margin, to three or five miles thick at the poles. As they find drift-scratches upon the tops of mountains in Europe three to four thousand feet high, and in New England upon elevations six thousand feet high, it follows, according to this hypothesis, that the ice-sheet must have been considerably higher than these mountains, for the ice must have been thick enough to cover their tops, and high enough and heayy enough above their tops to press down upon and groove and scratch the rocks. And as the stri# in Northern Europe were found to disregard the conformation of the continent and the islands of the sea, it became necessary to suppose that this polar ice-sheet filled up the bays and seas, so that one could have passed dry-shod, in that period, from France to the north pole, over a steadily ascending plane of ice.

No attempt has been made to explain where all this