Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/62

58 and get their edges still more turned up. This goes on continually, and meanwhile the discs are thickening and solidifying with the continued low temperature. This ice is known as "Pancake ice."

By continued and increased frost the edges of the pancakes get frozen together and the whole surface of the sea has a continuous sheet of ice, only to be broken up again, however, into fresh though larger hexagons, which in turn are hustled together and form magnified pancakes many feet in diameter. These require greater force, as they increase in thickness and solidity, to break up again, until eventually they remain together in one great solid sheet which nothing but a heavy gale and a tremendous sea will break into pieces. Those great sheets of ice, often many miles—it may be even hundreds of miles—in extent, are known in general terms as "Floes," or "Field ice," "Floe ice" usually being employed when they are less extensive, the term "Field ice" for ice that stretches unbroken beyond the limits of the eye from the crow's-nest.

A "Land floe" is a floe that is formed next the land and that remains fast to the land, if the weather is light, during, it may be, the whole of the following summer. Such a floe continues to increase in thickness during the second winter, but it is unlikely that the weather