1 8 Transactions of the Canadian Institute. [Vol. IX. 



these open lanes of water or even crushes the new ice which had formevl 

 in them, thus giving rise to ridges of ice where the open water was before. 



But farther than closing these open lanes of water, the ice does not 

 expand horizontally with the rise of temperature. 



It has been argued by many, and even by as high authorities as Pro- 

 fessor G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological vSurvey, and by Pro- 

 fessors Chamberlin and Salisbury in their Geology, Vol. I., p. 371, that 

 the ice expands with irresistible force and that it presses on the shores 

 and shoves the gravel and sand, to which it freezes, back each year until 

 it piles up walls of this gravel, sand and boulders around the shore. My 

 attention was drawn to statements such as these more than twenty years 

 ago and since that time I have spent many winters beside the frozen waters 

 of our north country and have watched closely for evidence of the pushing 

 of the ice towards the shore in winter, but have never been able to detect 

 any evidence of such action. The shores remain perfectly undisturbed 

 all winter except for the formation of the slope towards the water pre- 

 viously describe I, and if there is any change in the shore it would appear 

 to be in the nature of a drag towards the water rather than in the opposite 

 direction. Trees and boulders were seen lying just at the edge of the ice 

 and no tendency was ever observed far the ice to move up toward them 

 awav from, the lake. The ice was frozen too hard to the ground to permit 

 of anv shoreward movement. 



That the ice must expand with almost irresistible force is unquestion- 

 able, but my observations have clearly shown me that, even with very rapid 

 rises in temperature it does not expand horizontally, except to close the 

 lanes of open water. If such horizontal movements did occur a rise of 

 temperature of 5o°F. would mean that the ice on Lake Temiskaming, 

 which mav be taken as a fairly typical example of our northern lakes, 

 would expand thirty-five to fifty feet between its opposite shores, while 

 between New Liskeard and Fort Temiskaming, a distance of eighteen miles, 

 it would expand from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and twenty- 

 five feet, instead of which it does not appear to expand at all, for it does not 

 shove up on the shore during the winter. On Lake Winnipeg, which has 

 a width of sixty-six miles and a length of two hundred and sixty miles, 

 and which is frozen over completely every winter, a similar rise in tem- 

 perature would cause an expansion of five hundred feet to eight hundred 

 feet in the width of the ice, and two thousand to three thousand feet in its 

 length, while the only evidence of this expansion consists in the closing of 

 some few narrow lanes of open water. The expansion with increase of 

 temperature must, therefore, be taken up by a vertical thickening of the 



