150 DE. J. MORISON — ICE AND ITS WORK. 



the hills, so that its surface, which no doubt originally was very 

 mountainous and rugged, forms a great plateau of ice gently sloping 

 up towards the centre. Those daring explorers who have pene- 

 trated into the interior of the country describe the scene as desolate 

 in the extreme. As far as the eye can reach nothing is visible save 

 a dreary expanse of snow. Not a single animal or plant can be 

 seen ; over everything broods the silence of death, a silence only 

 broken by the dismal howling of the icy wind, which sweeps before 

 it clouds of blinding snow. 



Yet even here Nature is ceaselessly at work. As the snow 

 deepens it is pressed into ice by the weight of the snow above, 

 and that ice creeps outward to the coast, pressed onward by the 

 accumulating weight of snow, and thus, from the frozen mass 

 in the interior, innumerable glaciers flow down every valley and 

 fiord to the sea. Some of the glaciers attain an enormous size. 

 The great Humboldt glacier is said to be no less than 60 miles 

 wide, and its seaward face rises above the water to a height of 300 

 feet. Instead of the fiords being filled by water, in many cases 

 they are filled entirely by ice, which may even be pushed out some 

 distance into the open sea. 



"When a glacier enters the sea, as ice is lighter than water, the 

 dense sea-water underneath the ice buoys it up, and as the glacier 

 is pressed out into deeper and deeper water, at last the cohesion of 

 the ice is overcome, and large fragments float away as icebergs. 

 From its origin in the central desolation of Greenland to its ter- 

 mination in the sea, the glacier clings pertinaciously to its bed, but 

 when once the water gets underneath it and buoys it up, the pres- 

 sure in course of time becomes so great that enormous fragments 

 are broken off and float away. These icebergs are carried to the 

 south for an immense distance by ocean-currents, surrounded by an 

 atmosphere of wintry fog and frost, until they finally melt. Some 

 of these icebergs are of vast size. One Dr. Hayes estimated to 

 contain 27,000 millions of cubic feet, and to weigh no less than 

 2,000 millions of tons. 



The glaciers of Greenland are crossed by crevasses in the same 

 way as those in the Alps ; it is only, however, when we approach 

 the sea that much in the shape of moraine matter appears upon 

 their surface. This is due to the fact that the whole interior of 

 the country is so buried beneath snow and ice that there are left 

 above the surface, exposed to the action of frost, no bare rocky 

 crags from which fragments might become detached. The inland 

 valleys are all filled up and levelled to the tops of the hills. It is 

 not until the glaciers descend to near the sea-shore, where the 

 cliffs and mountains are more naked and exposed to the action of 

 the weather, that they begin to show anything like moraines on 

 their surface, and it is on the sea-coast that the greatest apparent 

 waste of rock takes place. When we remember, however, that 

 nearly the whole country is covered by an enormously thick sheet 

 of ice, which is constantly in motion, being pressed continually 

 onwards with resistless force towards the sea, we can hardly over- 



