88 HOBBS— CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [April 22, 



interrupted by rocky promontories which are surrounded on all 

 sides but the front by ice, and hence in reality the cliff furnishes 

 us with sections through nunataks and inland-ice alike. Says 

 Chamberlin :^® 



Only a few of the promontories of the coast rise high enough to be 

 projected across this sky line and interrupt the otherwise continuous stretch 

 of the glacial horizon. The ice does not meet the sky in a simple straight 

 line. It undulates gently, indicating some notable departure of the upper 

 surface of the ice tract from a plane. As the ice-field slopes down from the 

 interior to the border of the bay, it takes on a still more pronounced undu- 

 latory surface. It is not unlike some of our gracefully rolling prairies as 

 they descend from uplands to valleys, when near their middle-life develop- 

 ment. 



The two 1,200-mile sledge journeys of Peary in the years 1891- 

 92, and 1893-95 across the northern margin of the " Great Ice " 

 of Greenland, have added much to our knowledge of the physiog- 

 raphy of the inland-ice. These journeys were made on nearly 

 parallel lines at different distances from the ice border, and so, if 

 studied in relation to each other, they display to advantage the 

 configuration of the ice surface near its margin (see Fig. 25). 

 The routes were for the most part nearly straight and ran at 

 nearly uniform elevations which ranged from 5,000 to 8,000 feet 

 above the sea.^^ In the sections nearest the coast, however, the 

 route at first ascended a gentle rise to a flatly domed crest upon the 

 ice only to descend subsequently into a broad swale of the surface, 

 the bottom of which might be described as a plateau, and which 

 was continued in the direction of the coast by a tongue-like ex- 

 tension of the ice, such as the tongue in Petermann Fjord between 

 Hall Land and Washington Land (Fig. 25). On the further side 

 of this basin-like depression, the surface again rose until another 

 domed crest had been reached, after which a descent began into 

 a swale similar to the first. On the return journey by keeping 

 farther from the ice margin these elongated dimples upon the ice 

 surface were avoided. The broad domed surfaces which separate 

 the dimples clearly lie over the land ridges between the valleys 

 down which the glacier tongues descend toward the sea. 



^ " Glacial Studies in Greenland, III.," Jour. Geo!., Vol. 3, 1895, p. 63. 

 ^^ Geogr. Jour., Vol. 11, 1898, p. 215. See also his map, Bull. Am. Geogr. 

 Sac, Vol. 35, 1903, p. 496. 



