The evolution of climate

and Chapter III deals with the Tertiary period considered as leading up to the Quaternary Ice Age. Chapter IV discusses the subdivisions of the Glacial period, and the conflict...

The climate of any point on the earth’s surface depends on a complex of factors, some of them due to influences arriving from outside the earth, and others purely terrestrial. S...

It is a remarkable fact that one of the oldest known sedimentary rocks is glacial in origin, and indicated the presence of an ice-sheet at a very early stage in the earth’s hist...

The third of the great periods into which the geological record is divided is known as the Tertiary. Throughout most of its length it appears to have been characterized by remar...

As the land began to rise, the first effect was an increased snowfall on the higher summits, and increased rainfall on the rising coast lands. The rivers had an increasing fall...

The literature of the glacial period in Europe is stupendous and is, further, of a highly contradictory nature. Space does not permit of any summary of the great conflict betwee...

Our knowledge of the history of the Mediterranean basin during the Glacial period is not nearly so complete as is that of the more northern regions, chiefly for the reason that...

The great area of Asia is at present but little explored for glacial traces, but a certain amount of evidence has been collected, and the data from the various mountain district...

The glaciation of North America was even greater and more complicated than was that of Europe. It spread from three main centres, the Cordilleran or Rocky Mountain centre, the K...

The scarcity of data which was bewailed in dealing with Asia is still more marked in the case of South America, and it will be necessary to present the glacial history of that c...

The Quaternary history of Africa can unfortunately be dismissed in a very few words. The glaciation of the Atlas Mountains has already been referred to in connexion with the Med...

The continent of Australia has a relatively low relief, only rising above the snow-line in Mount Kosciusko, and glacial traces have a relatively unimportant development. The his...

The great Antarctic continent offers a unique problem to the glacial climatologist, for here we have a land area with the theoretical snow-line already at sea-level, and accordi...

the post-glacial climatic optimum extended to the Antarctic coast, and this is additional argument for extending the much greater interglacial oscillation southward beyond its k...

In Chapter V we left the climatic history of northern Europe at the point where the ice in its final readvance had once more reached the German coast. But Scandinavia was now si...

In most of the polar and temperate regions of the world the Glacial period seems to have been separated from the present by a short interval of slightly more maritime climate. T...

Hitherto we have been dealing with climatic changes which can be recognized with more or less certainty over most of the polar and temperate regions of the world, but we have no...

About 1800 B.C., or the beginning of the Bronze Age in Britain, the subsiding land finally attained approximately its present level. At the same time the climate of western Euro...

The question of climatic changes during the historic period has been the subject of much discussion, and several great meteorologists and geographers have endeavoured to prove t...

The origin of man from an ape-like ancestor[9] is generally admitted, but owing to the incompleteness of the palæontological record we are still in ignorance as to the circumsta...

It is a remarkable fact in human history that civilization began in regions which are at present inhabited chiefly by backward races, and the centres of progress have shifted fr...