Waterbury evening Democrat., 1904-01-22
GLACIERS ARE WANING.
Verified by the LatSst Evidence Cole
 lected in An Parts of the World. sa,.. .s.

The French Alpine club appointed a committee of scientific men two years ago to collect annually the results of sll the studies of glaciers made in every part of the world, and to prepare 3 yearly report. The second report, states the New York Sun, covering 1902, just issued, presents large amount of evi- dence to show that throughout the world the great majority of glaciers are manifesting constant tendency to diminish in area.
 Their lower ends are slowly retreat ing further up the mountains. There are exceptions to this rule in small districts, but these exceptions only ena- phasize the prevailing tendency every where, from the arctic to the antarctic zones. ..s 4
 In the Alps, for example. the diminu- tion of glaciation is everywhere notice- able, excepting in the Oriental Alps, where the glaciers are now little longer and thicker than they were at the beginning of the century. Through out the Cordilleras of the Andes the glaciers are retreating. s5s
 1t was reported last year that the great glacier on the west side of Mount Sarmiento, near the south end of South Africa, which Darwin found in 1886 to descend to the sea- is now separated from the shore by a vigorous growth of young timber. Albert Brun, who visit ed some of the glaciers of Spitzbergen last year, discovered that the present ter minus of the great East Glacier in Re- search bay ss now about 5000 feet back of the moraine which it deposited at some earlier period.
 M C. Engell has brought home evil dence that the Jacobshavn glacier, one of the largest in Greenland, has re- treated about four miles from 1850 to July, 1902. MT. Oven reports that the line of perpetual snow is now at a higher altitude among the mountains of Scandinavia than few years ago, and that the glaciers have diminished in abnormal proportions.
 This process has been going on in Scandinavia for a very long time. In many cases 1t is found that the present glacier ends are now over 5000 feet back of their terninations a century ago, as is shown by the glacier records which have been kept in that region for about 150 years. '2"
 Among the Rocky mountains the most notable recession of glaciers was that observed last year by Mir. Fenne- man, who found that the Arapahoe gia- cier had been rapidly retiring for sev- eral years; and he attributes the fact to a deficiency in snowfall in the past four winters. lat~ e
 Variations in the size of glaciers are, of course. due to climatic variations {. and if glaciers are not now so large as they were, 8 few years or decades ago, it is because the general weather con- ditions are more temperate. To illus trate this topic, the committee on gla- ciers has collected in it's report mass of the most curious and interesting tes- timony as to the severity of the win ters in the sixteenth seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. % 4g4* According to this evidence. eight feet | of snow fell in January, 1898, on the plain of Dauphine and upon the Au- yergne mountains, and many of the houses in the villages were completely hidden from view. Heavy snowfall 1 was recorded In France for six months l from November 2, 1913. to May, 1914 The summers of 1915 and 161S were phenomenally cold in France. Ice l formed in rivers on June Il and 12, 1915 1 and snow fell on the lower mountains on | August I, 161s Proof is given that l these centuries in which remarkably ] severe weather was recorded were pc
 riods of large growth of glaciers. The average weather conditions 1 throughout the world are now certain 1 Iy more temperate than in those days l if the old records are true; and the an
 nual means of temperature and precip'
 itation are now conducive to the di' l ;r. o< s,lo