The Coming Ice Age (ePub)

On Nov. 12, 1891, Professor Geikie made his presidential address before the Edinburgh Geological Society, the subject being "Supposed Causes of the Glacial Period."

Many of his views advanced in this lecture were so much in accordance with my own that I am induced to repeat them. He said that the glacial period was a general phenomenon due to some widely acting cause, and that where we now have the greatest rain-fall the greatest snow-fall took place, and that the Pleistocene period was characterized by great oscillations of climate, extremely cold and very genial conditions alternating. He also said that in glacial and post-glacial times changes in the relative level of the land and sea had taken place, and any suggested explanation which did not fully account for these various climatic and geographical conditions could not be satisfactory. And, while examining the earth-movement hypothesis, he pointed out that in the first place there was not the least evidence of great continental elevations and depressions in the northern hemisphere, such as the hypothesis postulated. Next he showed that, even if the diserrated earth-movements were admitted, they would not account for the phenomena.

Such changes, no doubt, would profoundly affect the maritime regions of North America and Europe; but they would not bring about the conditions that obtained at the climax of the ice age.

Another objection to the earth-movement hypothesis was this: it did not account for interglacial conditions. The advocates of that hypothesis imagined that these conditions would supervene when the highly elevated northern regions were depressed to their present level. But these were the conditions that obtained at the present time; and yet in spite of them the climate was neither so equable nor so genial as that which obtained in interglacial times and during the mild stage of the necessary post-glacial period.