Natural Regions of the U S S R Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Natural Regions of the U. S. S. R

The concern with both ichthyology, the field in which Berg first won his spurs, and the broader aspects of physical geography which these two studies illustrate, continued throughout his St. Petersburg period. Thus in 1906 and 1907 he worked on the fresh-water ichthyological fauna of the Caucasus, Lake Baikal, the Amur, Manchuria, Korea, North China, Siam, and other countries, using materials at hand in the Zoologi cal Museum. But in the same years he also prepared a note on the sands of Bolshie Barsuki in which he established their aeolian origin from local ferruginous sandstones rather than from the Aral Sea sands to which they had formerly been attributed; he also wrote a report on the results of a trip in the summer of 1907 to the glaciers at the headwaters of the river Isfara in the T urkestan range. In 1909 he published a large work on the fishes of the Amur basin in which he concluded that they bear a strongly relict character and are a survival of a subtropical fauna which was well distributed all over Eurasia at the end oi the Tertiary and the beginning of the post-tertiary era. In the summer of the same year he made an ex tended trip through the Caucasus collecting ichthyological specimens for the Zoological Museum.

Berg's study of the lakes of Transcaucasia and other new data led him to write the remarkable article Ou the Changes of Climate in the His torical Epoch which appeared in 1911. In this article Berg came to the conclusion that although the so-called Bruckner periodic variations in climate had taken place in -the historical epoch, in general the cli mate of the Northern Hemisphere had not changed, while in the im mediate postglacial period of prehistoric time it was considerably drier and warmer.

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