ICE ON THE EQUATOR.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1651, 21 October 1903, Page 69 (Supplement)

ICE ON THE EQUATOR.

The ice on the snow-capped mountains of the equator is the somewhat astonishing theme on which Mr J. E. S. Moore writes with authority m “Pearson’s Magazine.”

1 “ l lt must be almost inconceivable, even to many people who have been there, that within the sweltering barbarism of die tropics there arc places where there is any quantity of ice and snow. Natural ice, moreover, and not the dirty apology for it which it manufactured, and regarded now as a necessity by the white people who are gradmahy crowding into the languid warm til filling tho equatorial portions of th 6 earth. Right on the equator there arp both ice and snow covering wide -districcs, where, like a January midnight in the Old Country, ‘the air bites shrewdly and it is very cold.’ “The law that as we ascend the air get cooler and cooler about a degree' for every hundred feet, holds good in tho ; tropics, as well as in temperate i and thus it is merely a question of cliO | existence of sufficiently h.gli land anywhere, to insure the presence of both frost and enow. “As a matter of fact, it we look at su spherical map of the earch, or a globe, the line .where snow lies perpetually rises in a great curve, which begins at the sea level within the Arctic circles and rises over the equator to a height of between 13,000 and 14,000 feec*. In the British Isles thus line passes but a lew hundred feet above the top© of the Scots mountains, and it strikes the Alps about 7000 feec above the sea. “The Alps and the Caucasus, tlis Pyrennoe© and the Himalayas and the desolate arctic waste© are always covered with ice and snow above certain, height© anpl above certain latitudes: but in all these extra-tropical regions the enow and the ice shrink and expand as the seasons wax and wane, the snow of the Arctic extending during the winters over wide areas in the temperate regions, while from the high mountains the snowfields invade the deep forests and the cultivated areas in the valleys every time the winter set© in “The occasional oscillation, of the snowlines on the mountains, and the winter spreading of the Arctic ©nows and ice*, lravo each of them far-reaching effects upon the vegetation of temperate climates, which affect the forests as well as the flowers that grow under them, folr; they are both covered up with snow, or frozen out, for many months in the year. “It is on account of this circumstance that we get, in the great ranges north and south of the equator, what are termed Alpine florae, or plants, che welfare of winch depends upon their being covered up in deep snow for half the year, their structure having become specially, adapted to it. “At first sight we should perhaps expect that, the snow and the ice upon the mountains in the tropics should oscillate in, the same way; hut, as a matter of fact, it is perhaps the most market! characteristic of the sweltering tropics that they continue to swelter, withcj.it let or hindrance, throughout the year, the-sea-sons being simply marked by fits of hot drought and fits of equally hot rain.”