i885.] ^"«^ [Rink. 



ages. "When looked over from heights of the outer land, and as far as we 

 know from travelers who have wandered over it, only the marginal part 

 shows irregularities ; towards the interior the surface grows more and 

 more level and passes into a plain very slightly rising in the same direc- 

 tion. Here and there, a few mountain tops are seen emerging from the 

 uniform surface. These remains of the submerged land now look like 

 islands in a frozen ocean ; they are called by the natives : "Nunataks." 

 Upon these Nunataks, if they have a sufficient extent, snow certainly may 

 likewise accumulate so as to form glaciers. But these patches of snow 

 and ice serve to show the difference between ordinary highland-glaciers 

 and the ice crust that encompasses the foot of the same mountains. 

 Finally to prevent misapprehensions I must add, that in instituting a com- 

 parison I have only tried to indicate a similarity, not to identify the sur- 

 face of the glacier with that of a frozen sea. It must be remembered that 

 in the former the fissures are of a wholly different nature. The following 

 pages will show to what disappointments a traveler would be submitted 

 who ascended the inland ice hoping to find an inundated country upon 

 which the water was covered, like a lake, with solid ice. 



Movement of the Inland-Ice. — We have now considered how the 

 great glacier is able to represent the glacial epoch approximatively as re- 

 gards its extent, and the nature of its surftice But the most important 

 question still remains, how can the transportation of the boulders be ex- 

 plained? An Alpine glacier which carries stones down into the valley, 

 piling them up as moraines, does not account for the probability of the 

 transportation of similar masses from Norway to Germany, even if a sheet 

 of ice from 1000 to 2000 feet thick had covered the way they had to pass. 

 Here again we take recourse to Greenland, asking whether the inland-ice 

 is liable to movements that might correspond to the power required for 

 carrying such boulders ? To this question an affirmative answer can be 

 given. Recent investigations show that the great glacier is in continual 

 movement from the interior towards the sea, but that this action is con- 

 centrated to some particular points in an extraordinary degree. These 

 points are the so-called ice fjords from which the icebergs issue to the sea. 

 The quantity of these fragments corresponds to the velocity with which 

 the margin of the glacier is pushed on towards the sea. As regards the 

 intermediate spaces between the ice-fjords, the movement is so slight, that 

 the thawing action of the summer warmth balances it, and is able to keep 

 the margin within certain limits. 



Lieutenant Jensen's excursion over the inland-ice in 1878. — 

 For this excursion a locality was decided upon, in which the outer mar- 

 gin of the glacier had been annually seen by travelers who occasionally 

 passed by during the lapse of more than a hundred years without any 

 conspicuous change of its appearance having been observed. That it 

 was frequently noted was a natural consequence of its situation, as the 



