78 J5MITHS0NIAN EXPLORATION IN ALASKA IN I9O4 



parallel to the external face of the cliff. When these fissures descend 

 through the black boggy soil of the surface into the frozen mud 

 below, they become receptacles for the formation of ice, since the 

 water that oozes into them is congealed upon their sides until it 

 entirely fills them with a wall or dyke of solid ice. The fall of a 

 mass of mud from the outer side of one of these walls would expose 

 this ice, forming a case over the inner side of the fissure in which it 

 was accumulated. 



" ' 3dly. The manner in which an extensive facing of pure ice 

 may be formed on these cliffs, by water during the summer trickling 

 down their frozen surface from the soil above, and becoming con- 

 verted to ice in the course of its descent, has been described by 

 Captain Beechey [pages 258 and 330].' 



" Lieutenant Belcher, in his notes, proposes another theory to 

 explain the occurrence of masses of pure ice immediately below the 

 margin of the peat on the top of the cliff on the southern shore of 

 Eschscholtz Bay. He concieves that between the superficial bed 

 of spongy peat, and the mass of frozen mud which forms the body 

 and substance of this cliff, the water oozing downwards through 

 the peat, during the thaw of each successive summer, is stopped at 

 the point where it comes into contact with the perpetually frozen 

 earth below, and there accumulates into a thick horizontal sheet of 

 pure transparent ice, and that it is the broken edge of this icy stratum 

 which becomes exposed in the margin of the cliff during the process 

 of slow and gradual destruction which it is continually undergoing. 



" This opinion, however, is, I believe, peculiar to Lieutenant 

 Belcher. The experiment made by Mr. Collie in boring horizontally 

 into the cliff, through a vertical face of ice, until he penetrated the 

 frozen mud behind it, shows, that in this case the ice was merely 

 a superficial facing of frozen water, consolidated as it descended the 

 front of the cliff' ; and his further experiments in digging verticallv 

 downwards, in two places, through the peat into frozen mud, and 

 finding no traces of any intermediate bed of ice appear unfavorable 

 to any hypothesis as to the formation of a stratum of pure ice between 

 the superficial peat and subjacent mud. 



" It has just been stated that Captain Beechey and Mr. Collie pro- 

 pose three different solutions to explain the origin of these hanging 

 masses of ice near the upper margin of vertical cliffs: ist. That they 

 may have been formed from snow drifted into hollows of the cliffs, 

 and subsequently converted into ice; 2dly, From [601] water con- 

 solidatetd into ice within fissures and cavities, caused by the subsi- 

 dence and falling forwards of the frozen mud; 3dly, From water 



