We hear a great deal said about the age of Glaciers. This is assuming
that the Earth has at some time been in a condition to be almost
uninhabitable, as evidences of this Glacial influence seem to be
reported from all parts of the globe.
As the theory of a warmer climate having existed in primeval times and
that the Earth is and has been for ages cooling off hardly leaves a
place for a universal period of Glaciers.
It hardly seems rational that the vast accumulation of flora to produce
the coal deposits and sustain the wonderful specimens of animal and
reptile growth could have been interrupted by a period of ice. If so,
the earth in its present condition shows evidence of growing warmer
instead of cooling off.
It is by the writer seriously doubted that the many evidences
attributed to glaciers can be charged to their influence.
Where large rocks are found foreign to anything in their immediate
surroundings and similar to formations at quite long distances away,
the explanation that the straggling specimens were carried there by
glaciers is not necessarily conclusive.
There may be many instances where such evidences are the work of
glaciers, but it does not seem as if an ice age were needful to produce
the changes of rock, or to show the markings on rocks claimed to have
been caused by glacial abrasions. Icebergs can produce and explain
every such feature as is claimed for the glacier, and there seems to be
little reason to doubt that similar evidences such as are imputed to
glaciers are constantly going on as much at the present day as in any
remote age in the past.
There can be no doubt that icebergs have existed in all time from the
earliest movement of the Earth’s machinery.
As explained in treating of icebergs, an area of extent equal to some
of our smaller States frozen to a depth of thousands of feet breaks up
and floats away from the polar oceans. Presuming an iceberg large as
the State of Rhode Island to start off, which is very likely a small
estimate of the size of many, such berg being exposed to thawing winds
and the sun’s rays until thousands of miles away from its starting
point, and after all these exposures is often a mass of 300 or more
feet high and 2,000 feet deep. Imagine the weight and force of such a
body striking the peak of some submarine mountain, the top of a hill
with the momentum produced by wind and tide. There tops could as easily
be wiped off and carried long distances, as a man can strike off the
top of a measure of grain, and leave the same marks attributed to
glaciers.
These great masses of rock and soil supposed to be transferred from
their original deposit are carried long distances till melting has
loosened a hold, and they are dropped to the bottom of the ocean and
left for the wonderment and surmise of the future as to how they got
there. This process of wiping off high points of submarine lands must
be going on just as much at the present time as ever in the past, and
seems a very wise and cheap system of dredging instituted by Providence.
With the reasoning to follow of how the Earth obtains and maintains its
warmth an ice age would seem an impossibility and absurdity.