When we consider the magnitude of the ice-sheets which, it is claimed
by the glacialists, covered the continents during the Drift age, it
becomes evident that a vast proportion of the waters of the ocean
must have been evaporated and carried into the air, and thence cast
down as snow and rain. Mr. Thomas Belt, in a recent number of the
"Quarterly Journal of Science," argues that the formation of
ice-sheets at the poles _must have lowered the level of the oceans of
the world two thousand-feet!_
The mathematician can figure it out for himself: Take the area of the
continents down to, say, latitude 40°, on both sides of the equator;
suppose this area to be covered by an ice-sheet averaging, say, two
miles in thickness; reduce this mass of ice to cubic feet of water,
and estimate what proportion of the ocean would be required to be
vaporized to create it. Calculated upon any basis, and it follows
that the level of the ocean must have been greatly lowered.
What a vast, inconceivable accession of _heat_ to our
{p. 62}
atmosphere was necessary to lift this gigantic layer of ocean-water
out of its bed and into the clouds!
The ice, then, was not the cause of the cataclysm; it was simply one
of the secondary consequences.
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