Page Content (OCR)
polar opening is larger than the south. They say that there exists a Land of Paradise on the other side of the Mammoth Ice Barrier, which must be passed before one reaches a warmer climate in the land that lies beyond the Pole, over ee a =| Around the curve at the polar opening is another ring of ice, called the Great Massive Fresh Water Ice Pack or Ice Barrier. Here is where icebergs originate. Each winter, this ring of ice is formed from fresh water which flows out from the inside of the Earth. During the winter months, billions of tons of free-flowing fresh water, coming from rivers inside the Earth and flowing toward the outside through the polar openings, freeze at their mouth and form mountains of fresh water ice, whose presence in this region would be inexplicable if the Earth was a solid sphere. In summer time, huge icebergs, miles long, break off and float to the outside of the Earth. They are composed of fresh water, when there could exist only salt water at the poles. Since this is the case and since all water on the outside of the Earth in these regions is salty, the fresh water of which these icebergs are composed must come from its interior. Inside the icebergs, the mammoth and other huge tropical animals, believed to be of prehistoric origin because never seen on the Earth's surface, have been found in a perfect state of preservation. Some of them have been found to have green vegetation in their mouths and stomachs at the time they were suddenly frozen. The usual explanation is that these are prehistoric animals which lived in the Arctic region at the time when it had a tropical climate, and that the coming of the Ice Age, suddenly converted the Arctic from a tropical to a frigid zone and froze them before they had time to flee southward. The great ivory deposits from elephants, found in Siberia and islands of the north, are also explained in this way. Gardner, however, holds to an entirely different theory, which was supported by the observations of Admiral Byrd of a huge mammoth-like creature in the "land beyond the Pole," which he discovered. Gardner claims that mammoths are really animals now inhabiting the interior of the Earth, which have been carried to the surface by rivers and frozen inside of the i ice that formed when the rivers reached the surface, forming glaciers and icebergs. In Siberia, along the Lena River, there lie exposed on the soil and buried within it, the bones and tusks of millions of mammoths and mastadons. The consensus of scientific opinion is that they are prehistoric remains, and that the mammoth existed some 20,000 years ago, but was wiped out in the unknown catastrophe we now call the last Ice Age. It was Schumachoff, a fisherman living in Tongoose, Siberia, who, in 1799, first discovered a complete mammoth frozen in a clear block of ice. Hacking it free, which Admiral Byrd flew.