Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/449

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Port Foulke, which, as before observed, rise one hundred and ten feet above the sea-level. At Cairn Point the abrasion is very marked, and, where the polished line of syenitic rock leaves off and the rough rock begins, is quite clearly defined. This same condition also exists at Littleton Island (or, rather, McGary Island, which lies immediately outside of it) to an almost equally marked degree. I have before mentioned the evidences of a similar elevation of the opposite coast found in the terraced beaches of Grinnell Land.

It is curious to observe here, actually taking place before our eyes, those geological events which have transpired in southern latitudes during the glacier epoch, not only in the abrasion of the rock as seen at Cairn Point and elsewhere, but in the changes which they work in the deeper sea. In this agency the ice-foot bears a conspicuous influence. This ice-foot is but a shelf of ice, as it were, glued against the shore, and is the winter-girdle of all the Arctic coasts. It is wide or narrow as the shore slopes gently into the sea or meets it abruptly. It is usually broken away toward the close of every summer, and the masses of rock which have been hurled down upon it from the cliffs above are carried away and dropped in the sea, when the raft has loosened from the shore and drifted off, steadily melting as it floats. The amount of rock thus transported to the ocean is immense, and yet it falls far short of that which is carried by the icebergs; the rock and sand imbedded in which, as they lay in the parent glacier, being sometimes sufficient to bear them down under the weight until but the merest fragment rises above the surface. As the berg melts, the rocks and sand fall to the bottom of the ocean; and, if the place of their deposit should one day rise