THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



NOVEMBER, 1894 

 THE GLACIERS OF GREENLAND. 



By Prof. ANGELO HEILPEIN. 



THE traveler wlio skirts the coast of Greenland, and suffi- 

 ciently far from it to permit Mm to look over the rugged 

 cliffs which almost everywhere dip abruptly into the dark blue 

 ocean, sees above these a long, undulating white crest, beyond 

 which are only sky and conjecture. The white crest glistens 

 awhile in the bright sunlight, elsewhere it disappears in the hazy 

 mist which silently crawls over the landscape and shrouds it in 

 a more or less permanent veil of obscurity. Between the cliffs 

 and bluffs, whose crests rise well into the plane of respectable 

 mountain height, soaring to three, four, and six thousand feet 

 elevation, broad valleys oj^en out to the sea, which here show a 

 carpet of beautiful and inviting green, and elsewhere lie immo- 

 bile beneath vast sheets of ice which have invaded them and 

 remained possessors of the soil. In some places the ice sheets 

 quite touch the sea, in others they mark a white line across the 

 valley, which is at once the termination of the ice and of the 

 vegetation which crawls up to it. These are the Greenland 

 glaciers, whose tongues the eye readily unites with the interior 

 ice crest, the snow parent to which they owe their birth. 



In its fundamental construction a Greenland glacier is much 

 like every other glacier; it neither agrees absolutely with nor 

 differs essentially from the glaciers of the Alpine type. It is only 

 in the matter of size that it can lay claim to special distinction. 

 If the snows of Switzerland and Norway build up glaciers of pos- 

 sibly two, three, or four miles' width, those of Greenland are com- 

 pacted into ice rivers of from two to five times this width, and 

 exceptionally into streams with perhaps ten or even fifteen times 



VOL. XLVI. 1 



