Land Ice of Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions 47 



Their general character is shown in fig. 1, plate vii. This sketch 

 from Captain Beechey's Narrative of the Voyage of the Blossom 

 illustrates a deposit of snowdrift ice as typically developed on the 

 Arctic coasts. They are of an entirely recent and transitory nature, 

 not to be confused with beds of ice in any way. They lie banked 

 solidly against the escarpments at intervals along the Arctic coast 

 and sometimes along the larger rivers. Sometimes they persist for 

 a number of years, but all are eventually undermined by the waves 

 or undercutting of the banks against which they hang and disappear 

 to be repeated elsewhere under more favorable conditions. 



Sir John Richardson ^' remarks : " Elsewhere on the coast, cliffs 

 equally vertical, but having a different exposure, were seen masked 

 by a talus of snow, over which a coating of soil had been thrown 

 by land floods of melting snow pouring down from the inland 

 slopes. The duration of these glacier-like snow banks varies with 

 circumstances. When the cliff's rise out of deep water, the ice on 

 which the talus rests is broken up almost every summer, and the 

 superincumbent mass, previously consolidated by the percolation 

 and freezing of water, floats away in form of an iceberg. In other 

 situations the snow cliffs remain for a series of years, with occasional 

 augmentations marked by corresponding dirt bands, and disappear 

 only towards the close of a cycle of warm summers. In valleys 

 having a northern exposure and sheltered by high hills from the 

 sun's rays, the age of the snow may be very considerable ; but it is 

 proper to say that though aged glaciers of this description do exist 

 on the shores of Spitzbergen and Greenland, they are of very rare 

 occurrence indeed on the continental coast of America." 



Such snowdrift ice deposits also form in canons, gullies, and 

 ravines, but most generally are carried away each summer. They 

 occur at all levels from present river banks and bottoms to places 

 favoring their formation high upon mountain sides. The writer 

 has seen occurrences of snow ice of drift origin banked solidly 

 against the escarpment faces of the old dead elevated ice beds where 

 it was intimately associated and almost incorporated with the face 

 of the older ice. 



One who has not seen its mode of occurrence, examining samples 

 from it in the laboratory, upon classifying the ice merely upon its 

 physical appearances and comparing such results with those of other 

 experiments not having the same bearing, might assert that it pos- 

 sessed all the characters of drift snow ice as to air and dirt content, 



^'Zoology of the Voyage of the Herald, 1854, p. 6. 



