Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/179

Rh can climb, and ascend into tile interior over the inland ice, of which it is a prolongation. A little way eastward, the covering is found to be hard glacier ice, rising by a gentle slope,—covered in the winter and spring with a thick coating of snow, which partially melts during the summer, forming considerable lakelets on the surface of the ice, or courses over it in the shape of streams that thunder down the deep crevasses which divide it here and there as in ordinary glaciers. No sign of living thing is seen on it, save patches here and there of a low order of plants identical with or allied to the “red snow” (Ancylonema Nordenskjöldii, Protococcus vulgaris, P. nivalis, and Scytonema gracilis); no moraine of any description, showing that the ice could not have impinged on land in its travels; and no sign of the ice having come in contact with any other physical influence save that of the atmosphere, unless the presence here and there in hollows of the minute powder-like mineral “kryokonite” is to be considered an exception. The few explorers who have ever attempted to penetrate this terrible waste all give the same account. Travel eastward, and nothing but ice—rough, crevasse-torn, white, earthless, moraineless, lifeless—is seen, until, in the far distance, the view is bounded by a dim, misty horizon of ice, which, at a distance of about 30 miles inland, rises to a height of 2000 feet above the sea. North is ice; south is ice; and behind are seen the “outskirts,” or ice-bare islands. The only exception to this general statement is to be found in the fact that here and there the ice has licked in and surrounded, but not yet covered, bits of high land near the coast, which stand out black amid the surrounding icy whiteness. Such an island in the ice is known to the Greenlanders as a “nunatak.” A noted one has long been known to exist some 50 miles east of the westward edge of the inland ice north of Frederikshaab. It was long supposed to be merely the east coast mountains, the country being narrow at this point; but the explorations of Lieut. Jensen, R.D.N., in July and August 1878, prove it to be a peak 5000 feet high,—i.e., about 3000 feet above the surrounding ice,—entirely isolated. On the other side of this mountain ridge the glacier field was observed stretching without interruption as far as the eye could see, the plateau apparently rising higher and higher to the east, which may account for the fact that the German explorers did not notice the inland ice in their explorations of Franz Josef Fjord. The high peak only proves that, though in the course of ages the winter snow, unmelted by the summer heats, has got compressed into the glacier sheet which has covered the interior, and is partially discharging its surplus in the form of icebergs on the coast, it has not yet accumulated to such depths as to overwhelm these elevated places. It may, however, do so in time; for, though it is clear that at one time the climate of Greenland was very different from what it is now, it is equally evident that at no very distant date the ice overspread much of the now uncovered outskirts. The so-called “glaciers” which reach the sea are long or short, broad or narrow, according to the character of the valley through which they creep seaward. Thus a coast “glacier,” so called, may be 40 miles broad, like the Great Glacier of Humboldt, or only a few yards, like most of the others in Greenland. When the glacier reaches the sea it ploughs along the bottom, until, by the force of the water, its end is buoyed up and finally broken off in the shape of an iceberg, which is carried by the winds and currents out to

sea to be in time again melted and absorbed into the ocean whence it originally sprang. If, on the contrary, the sea is shallow, the glacier will protrude for a considerable distance, as in the case of the Isblink, a little north of the fishing-station of Avigait (62° 32′ N. lat), which is a low sandy beach projecting about 8 miles in front of the inland ice, and forming a breakwater against the force of the waves. From under the Arctic glacier pours, as in the Alpine ones, a muddy stream, which silts up some of the fjords, and forms deposits identical with the laminated glacial clays of Britain. Such, in brief, is the inland ice of Greenland, which has been known since the days of Fabricius, but has only been recently generally recognized, and even yet is imperfectly understood in its all-important bearings on the study of ancient glacial remains.

