12 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



thousand square miles there are no mountains, consequently no gla- 

 ciers. Geologists tell us that a few millenniums ago there was a 

 sheet of ice covering England in Europe and New England in 

 America. At that time what are now the cities of New York and 

 London were covered by an ice sheet, but there was no ice sheet 

 covering the low plains of northern Alaska, and there never has 

 been since.* The explanation is that northern Alaska is low, 

 flat land with a precipitation so light that the snow which falls in 

 winter is all thawed away in the spring. 



These being the facts, it seems strange at first that people should 

 so universally have the idea that the lands of the far north are 

 covered with glaciers. The explanation is simple. There is one 

 land in the north that is covered with glaciers and from it all the 

 rest of the north has been pictured by analogy. Greenland is a 

 mass of high mountains in a region of precipitation so heavy that 

 the heat of summer does not suffice to thaw all the accumulated 

 snows of winter, so they change into glacier ice that flows down the 

 valleys into the sea and breaks off into the icebergs that are the 

 delight and dread of the transatlantic tourist. We thus have in 

 fact as well as in the hymn-book "Greenland's icy mountains." 

 And Greenland is close to the big modern centers of population. 

 In the days before Standard Oil became the light of the world the 

 whale and seal fisheries were profitable, and men from nearly every 

 seaboard town were engaged in them. They brought home stories 

 of the ice of Greenland and some of them wrote books about it. 

 In more recent years about every other owner of a yacht has more 

 or less timorously approached Greenland, near enough at least to 

 see the ice and to talk and write about it. And because Greenland 

 has been truthfully described as a land mainly ice-covered, we have 

 thoughtlessly assumed that all northern lands are similarly ice- 

 covered. Some glaciers, although much smaller, exist in Franz 

 Josef Land and in Spitsbergen, and there are glaciers of consider- 

 able size in Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Islands, and lesser ones in 

 Baffin Island. But when you get west of that, the great archipelago 

 that stretches northward from Canada towards the Pole is quite 

 free of them and so is all the Canadian mainland along the polar 

 sea and southward to the arctic circle and beyond, except for some 

 high valleys and peaks in the Rockies. 



But even after making it clear that Greenland is a peculiar 

 island and the only one having an ice cap, and after explaining 



♦See "Canning River Region of Northern Alaska," by Ernest de Koven 

 Leffiugwell, published by the U. S. Geological Survey, 1919. 



