92 



NATURALIST'S GUIDE TO THE AMERICAS 



Four kinds of ice form the barrier 

 to the coast the Great Ice from the 

 Arctic Ocean; the West Ice from the 

 Arctic Archipelago ; the Winter Ice formed 

 in the fjords, bays and sounds of the 

 Greenland coast itself; and the ice-bergs, 

 the discharge of the glaciers debouching 

 upon the sea from the ice-cap. 



Relief 



Greenland considered as a whole, 

 is essentially a plateau, the elevated 

 surface of an old peneplain, with two 

 central points of maximum elevation, 

 from which the ice-cap slopes away on 

 all sides. The northern center of eleva- 

 tion, over 9000 ft., lies on the seventy- 

 third parallel, approximately half-way 

 between the east and west coasts; the 

 southern center, 7500 ft., is an elongated 

 divide half-way between the coasts, 

 from 64 N. to 68 N. latitude. Both the 

 northern and the southern portion of the 

 plateau tilt toward the north, so that 

 the southern slopes are steeper and 

 shorter than the northern slopes. The 

 northern slope of the northern block 

 extends roughly over ten degrees lati- 

 tude. Isolated peaks, and tracts of 

 considerable size, rise above the general 

 level of the interior plateau, and along 

 the coast at several points, cordilleran 

 areas rise far above the average marginal 

 elevation. 



Because the general level of the coastal 

 belt of ice-free land is very high, except 

 along the northern shore, and deeply 

 dissected, the scenery along most of the 

 coast is exceedingly wild and pictur- 

 esque. Precipitous cliffs and headlands 

 rise sheer out of the sea thousands of 

 feet to form the entrances and walls of 

 fjords and bays and gulfs of exceeding 

 grandeur. Deep cleft-like valleys; low 

 narrow forelands; small deltas at the 

 mouths of streams; majestic snowcapped 

 peaks and domes rising above the pla- 

 teaus; picturesque, rocky skerries and 

 islets innumerable; satin-white glaciers 

 discharging colossal bergs into the sky- 

 blue sea in summer these are the 

 elements of a landscape^that surpasses 



in wild beauty the most scenic spots 

 of the rest of the world. 



The coastal belt is generally rugged 

 and rough with steep slopes of angular 

 scree, or precipitous cliffs with narrow 

 ledges. At places, even where the relief 

 is highest, broad valleys, probably 

 carved out by active glaciers when the 

 ice mantle was more extended than at 

 present, lie between the table-lands of 

 the headlands, and along considerable 

 stretches of coast, forelands of varying 

 width lie between the sea and the higher 

 lands behind. 



Drainage 



Though Greenland is a large land, it 

 has no streams of any size, and such 

 streams as there are, are frozen for 

 almost ten months of the year. In the 

 short summer every gulch and valley 

 bears a torrential rushing streamlet, fed 

 by the rapidly melting snows of the 

 coastal land-belt, and by the marginal 

 ice of the ice-cap. The ice-cap does 

 not melt very far back from its edge, 

 generally not within the 4500 ft. eleva- 

 tion in the northern part, and the 6000 

 ft. contour in the southern part; as a 

 consequence no great rivers are formed. 



The many brooks and smaller stream- 

 lets are turbulent and impassable after 

 the summer melting begins, and the 

 freshets sweep before them great vol- 

 umes of detritus. Those streams that 

 have their sources in the ice-cap, and 

 flow considerable distances across the 

 coastal border-land, often augmented 

 by tributaries from local neve on the 

 marginal plateau-tracts, or from snow- 

 beds along the valley, may become river- 

 like in volume and burden of material 

 carried, and sweep torrentially seaward 

 the sand, gravel, and boulders that fall 

 or roll into their currents. 



The Ice-cap 



The ice-cap, the dominant feature of 

 the Greenland landscape, as well as the 

 dominant factor in the environmental 

 complex, is the largest remnant of the 

 great mantle of ice that lay over the 

 northern part of the northern hemi- 



