The Key West Citizen

THE ICE AGE
(Boston Sunday Globe)
Our favorite planet has been slow in warming
up this year. We Northerners don't like such
freaks of nature. When we have to sleep under
blankets into July we feel that we are being
cheated. Our Winter was prolonged; our summer
has been shortened. As if this were not bad luck
enough for one season, along comes the cheerful
tip that we may as well make the most of what there
is left, because this may be the last Summer we
shall have.

The Westminster Gazette has announced that
the earth is about to be afflicted with another Ice
Age.

According to the geologists, the last Glacial
Age set in some 100,000 years ago, and began to
soften, so that the northern world became comfort-
ably habitable, from 25,000 to 50,000 years back.
The anthropologists depose that our ancestors then
trekked up into Europe from points south in Asia
and Africa.

It is not easy to visualize what another Ice
Age would be like. We have, of course, no chron-
icles describing the phenomenon. It happened hun-
dreds of centuries before the written word was in-
vented. The eyewitnesses very likely had not even
acquired the art of communicating through the
spoken word. Anyway, the scientific testimony is
that our own direct ancestors did not migrate into
Europe until the glacial period was well on the
wane.

Some of the more immediate effects are noted
by the Westminster Gazette, which has covered the
impending event very completely. There would
soon be a fall of five degrees in the average tem-
perature. The polar ice cap would move farther
and farther southward, impeding the Atlantic
steamship lanes. Spring would be delayed longer
and longer each year, with disastrous effects on
production and the cost of food. Eventually the
wheat belt would have to move nearer the Equator.
Undoubtedly, Florida would enjoy a boom of
at least 5000 years' duration. The center of civil-
ization in the western hemisphere would probably
move from North to South America.

Scientific speculations of this nature serve one
useful purpose. They stagger man's imagination
and deflate his ego. Only when his mind is shocked
into contemplation of the grandeur of the universe
does he realize what a puny, unimportant dust-
speck he is. His whole planet, his entire solar sys-
tem, in fact, is a mere flicker in the infinitude of
the stellar universe.

Prophecy of another Ice Age, however, ought
not seriously to alarm us.