CHAPTER L 



INTO THE UNKNOWN BEYOND THE RINGNES ISLANDS 



AT many places in the North we have seen a peculiarity 

 which the geologists refer to as "raised beach lines." Where 

 waves from an open sea strike the shore a beach is formed 

 having the characteristic features familiar to all of us. Later the 

 land may rise so that these elevated beaches are tens or hundreds 

 of feet above sea level and sometimes at long distances inland. 

 In some parts of the polar ocean there is enough open water in 

 summer for beaches of this characteristic type to be formed and 

 their geological remnants are discovered at high latitudes no less 

 than low in the character of elevated beaches. But in other places 

 wave action on the shore is either rare or entirely prevented by the 

 continuous presence of ice at all seasons. The force that works 

 against the shore is not that of wind-created waves and breakers, 

 but the thrust under almost infinite pressure of the edge of the ice 

 floe against the land. The action of lake ice on the shores espe- 

 cially of small lakes has often been described and attributed to the 

 expansion and contraction of the ice surface under changes of tem- 

 perature. This force is enough to heap up boulder ridges and move 

 large rocks. 



Expansion and contraction of ice may have its effect to a slight 

 degree in the formation of the peculiar northern beaches we are 

 now trying to describe, but the main force is that of the wind, or 

 of the currents which are in the main created by the winds. Some- 

 times the ice heaps up on the land and thousands of tons of it are 

 shoved hundreds of feet inland and twenty or thirty feet above 

 the level of high tide. Such action takes place in Alaska, for 

 instance, at Point Barrow where, according to information given 

 me by Mr. Brower, the houses which stand one or two hundred 

 yards from the beach are every few years in danger. Mr. Brower 

 takes it for certain that eventually his large storehouse will be de- 

 stroyed in this way, for it was built by white men who did not 

 appreciate the distance to which ice may be shoved up on the land ; 

 and the beach is already being cut away by waves and the sea 



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