80 MARION EXPEDITION TO DAVIS STRAIT AND BAFFIN BAY 



Though enormous in size, these glaciers with floating ends produce 

 no icebergs. Humboldt Glacier with its 60-mile w^all of ice fronting 

 on Kane Basin is the largest glacier in the Northern Hemisphere; 

 in fact for many years after its discovery, it was believed actually 

 to be the wall of the inland ice itself. This glacier is only productive 

 over a short breadth of its northern side, where Koch in 1923 

 observed a collection of icebergs, probably a thousand in number, 

 strewn out for a distance of 3 miles. They were so closely packed 

 against the front in some places that it was difficult to determine 

 where the glacier ended and the bergs began, and also they were 

 apparently aground, suffering continual melting and disintegration 

 during the summer. Throughout the year fast ice completely covers 

 the glacier wall and stretches forward to a line from Cape Forbes 



The Largest Glacier in the Arctic 



Kir.UEE 39. — A s('crii>ii of the largest tidewater glacier in the north ; Humlioldt Glacier, 

 With its 60-mile wide front of ice facing the waters of Kane Basin, northwest 

 Greenland, early explorers first mistook it for the inland ice itself. This photo- 

 graph shows a group of several hundred icebergs that are penned against the 

 front of the glacier hy the fast ice. Once in 20 or 25 years the fast ice is said to 

 break up, allowing many of the bergs to move away in the currents. (Photograph 

 by L. Koch, 1928.) 



to Dallas Bay, but occasionally, perhaps once every five years or so, 

 the sea ice more or less completely breaks up in Kane Basin, allow- 

 ing many of the bergs which are not permanently grounded to drift 

 abroad. Although the Humboldt is the largest glacier in Greenland, 

 only a few of its bergs are believed ever to reach Baffin Bay, a con- 

 clusion which is supported by the fact that very few icebergs have 

 ever been found adrift north of the seventy-eighth parallel. Hia- 

 watha Glacier, the last one included in the north Greenland group, 

 is merely a small tongue extending out from the inland ice into 

 Inglefield Land, its end not even approaching close to the sea. In 

 the north Greenland district we estimate that on an average 150 

 bergs are produced annually, most of them calved from one glacier — 

 the Humboldt. 



