Page:The Journal of geology (IA journalofgeology21894univers).pdf/146
tudinal section in the best accordance with the probable distribution of the erosive power in a glacier.
The rock matter which was scooped out by the epiglacial glaciers was deposited partially as terminal moraines, but mostly as terraces in the fjords. We therefore now find the epiglacial lakes everywhere separated from the fjord heads by some kilometers of terrace land. These great upper terraces mark the level of the epiglacial sea. Their height differs very much in the different districts, and it was first by the study of the corresponding ancient sea beaches that I was able to find the correlation between them. In western and northern Norway, these ancient sea margins are very distinctly marked, often in the living rock. As might be expected, in accordance with the theory of isostasy of the earth's crust, these lines are now raised towards the former center of the ice sheet, from which the maximum ice load was taken away. Nearest this point the epiglacial sea beach and terraces now reach 200 meters above the sea, with a gradual fall towards the outer coast, where their height is only some 20 meters or less. The gradient in the fall is much greater than in Lake Agassiz, reached 1.2 meters (4′) per kilometer, again 0.10 meters (20″), but it is clearly the same cause that has been at work in both cases.
The height of the deuteroglacial ice sheets seems to have been almost the same as in the proteroglacial—less than 2,000 meters maximum above the present sea level.
The epiglacial terraces contain in some places banks of shells with quite an arctic aspect. The deeper clay has Leda artica as its leading fossil. The climate must have been very like that at present in South Greenland, and the topographical physiognomy must also have been very much the same, with a partially alpine foreland (which constituted nunatak forms as in the proteroglaciated epoch), and with glaciers at the heads of the fjords, with great clay bars or deltas before them, and with small floating icebergs to score out the strandlinjer—the sea beaches in the rock.
It is altogether probable that a meteorological map of Nor-