Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/110

100 Cape Farewell, where Greenland rises amid a group of rocky islands, to more than 1,300 miles northward, and far beyond, where no human step has trod, a rigid sea of ice sweeps its appalling and silent surface. The ice piled up upon central axes forces itself outward in vast sheets and icy currents to the shore. This universal exudation of ice makes an ice-wall many hundred feet high along the coast, an impressive feature in that northern land, and a solemn token of the desolation it protects. At its foot a shelf of ice projects into the water, in places a smooth table, but more frequently tossed in the wild commotion of confused hummocks straining and grinding together, urged by the resistless impetus of the arctic tides.

From the wide central area descend numerous glaciers upon both the eastern and western coasts, and fimbriate by slow erosion the rockbound land. Thus carved, in the long succession of ages, deep fiords penetrate the country, walled by lofty and inaccessible precipices, and terminating at the feet of ice-tongues which protrude their burdens of rock, gravel, mud, and soil, into their waters. In places these deposits shallow the water to great distances; and far from shore, rounded rocks, transported from interior highlands, project their polished summits above the waves. Bowlders of green-stone and syenite, rounded by friction and brought from remote localities, are scattered over wide districts. Again, upon the ice-foot which fringes the base of the cliffs, bowlders, tons in weight, are found, dislodged by frosts from the rocks above, and composed of magnesian limestone and inferior sandstones, while elsewhere long backs of rocks are seen abraded and furrowed by ice-floes and glaciers.

The glaciers occur at the indentations of the shore-line and where the cliffs decline, affording them approach to the waters. Here breaking into gigantic fragments, each one a towering iceberg, or slowly melting in the warmer waters of the sea, they constantly waste away, and are as constantly replenished from the inexhaustible and overflowing reservoirs they have left. The great conduit from the inland sea is the Humboldt Glacier, which extends its glassy wall, 300 feet high, along the deepest water for sixty miles, pouring out incalculable volumes of ice, laden and penetrated with bowlders, trophies of its resistless march from hidden and unknown recesses. Kane's Northumberland Glacier, interesting from the apparent viscosity of the ice, reaches from the interior to the coast unbroken, even when subjected to most unequal and various descents, by any fracture, while in many places "it could be seen exuding its way over the very crest of the rocks, and hanging down in huge stalactites seventy or one hundred feet long." This glacier carried enormous measures of earth, gravel, and rubbish. The Great Glacier is rifted in long shelves, which at a distance seem pressed together, the intermediate crevasses appearing as lines above one another. As the motion conspicuous in every part of this glacier successively brings these detached walls to the seas, they are floated