154 



NATURE 



[December i, 1910 



over the snow to the very summit of Mt. Nordenskiold 

 (3460 feet), not reaching Advent Bay again until near 

 midnight. The plateau which we traversed in returning 

 to the ship was tesselated in places with fine examples of 

 the singular " gardens " due to soil-creep — round or poly- 

 gonal patches of clayey soil, up to 15 feet in diameter, 

 bordered by slabs of stone, often on edge — which are 

 remarkable in the Spitsbergen tundras at all levels, as in 

 those of other Arctic lands. 



Leaving Advent Bay at noon on August 4, our course 

 was shaped eastward under the cliffs to Sassen Bay, where 

 we made a short landing near Mt. Marmier to collect 

 the abundant Triassic fossils and to examine the diabase 

 which is here intruded conspicuously in sheets among the 

 sed.iments. It was instructive to see how the shaly '1 rias, 

 very like our Lias in composition, was creeping down the 

 slopes in big partly frozen mud-flows, mixed with ice and 

 with blocks of diabase, providing a mass ready to be 

 worked up by any advancing glacier into the semblance of 

 our darker boulder-clays. This, indeed, is the particular 

 value of the Spitsbergen phenomena to the English 

 glacialist, that the country rocks are analogous in structure 

 and texture to those of England, and are rarely of the 

 hard type prevalent in nearly all other accessible regions of 

 present-day glaciation. 



, Crossing Sassen Bay, we landed our palaeontologists at 

 Cape Bjona, under the fluted cliffs of Mt. Temple, for 

 the collection of Carboniferous fossils from the in- 

 exhaustible stores of the limestones. The glacialists then 

 went on with the ship to the head of Temple Bay, where 

 the Von Post Glacier conies down to the sea with a front 

 of ice-cliffs three miles . broad. This glacier is now in 

 retreat, and lateral moraines of its former extension line 

 the .fiord on both sides for' a' distance of more than a mile 

 from the present front. Ice-falls from the glacier into the 

 sea 'cause waves that have carved out cliffs 30 or 40 feet 

 high, in places, clearly, revealing the composition of the 

 moraines. These cliffs were strikingly similar to those 

 of some English boulder-clays ; indeed, but for' the gleam 

 of the neighbouring ice, one might. have imagined oneself 

 under a- sea-cliff of north-east Yorkshire. ■ The red loamy- 

 clay of the sections was studded, not too abundantly, with 

 well-striated , boulders , of igneous and metamorphic rocks 

 (from ' some _ unknown source beneath the glacier) along 

 with others, more numerous, of grey and red sandstones, 

 conglomerate, chert. Carboniferous limestone, and other 

 sedimentary rocks. . Both moraines formed broad hum- 

 mocky- ridges, with troughs of lower ground behind them. 



A party of . five -German' explorers, under the leadership 

 of Lieut. W. Filchner, who were intent upon a journev 

 into the interior of Spitsbergen, had been with us up to 

 this point, interesting us. greatly by the preparation of 

 their outfit during the voyage. Now, with a heartening 

 cheer, we left them to begin their adventures, our ship 

 returning in the. quiet evening sunlight for the night's 

 anchorage at . Bjona Harbour, where the impatient 

 palaeontologists hungrily declared that we were trying to 

 starve them into glacialism ! 



Next day we coasted eastward to Klaas Billen Bay, and 

 then northward up this deep inlet nearly to its head. A 

 new phase in the stratigraphy of the island was here most 

 instructively displayed in its bare brightly tinted slopes. 

 Red Devonian strata rose up in strong force on its western 

 side until unconformably overlain by the " Culm," which 

 is believed to be of Lower Carboniferous age, while the 

 limestones and cherts of the LTpper Carboniferous rested 

 in still bolder unconformity on both. A great fault cuts 

 out the Devonian at the head of the bay ; and east of it 

 the Carboniferous rocks are known to rest directly upon 

 bosses of an ancient complex group assigned to the 

 Archaean, which we had not time to reach. Under the 

 instruction of our leader these complicated features were 

 made plain to us from the ship, and we realised how great 

 was our advantage in gaining so comfortably in an hour 

 the knowledge that would have cost many laborious days 

 to gather without such guidance. Most of the day was 

 spent on shore at the western side of the fiord ; then, after 

 a late dinner on the ship, we went to land again at 

 10 p.m. on the eastern arm, for a midnight stroll to the 

 Nordenskiold Glacier, which breaks off with a sea-front 

 of three miles in water reaching nearly 500 feet in depth. 



NO. 2144, VOL. 85] 



Under an overcast sky, which intensified the cold blue- 

 ness of the ice, we crossed the tesselated tundra with its 

 shelly terraces of raised beach to the southern moraine 

 of tne glacier, and saw how the grey shelly mud had 

 been incorporated with the moraine. This was our coldest 

 night, witn no sun; but we were fortified by a camp-fire 

 on the beach, and hot coffee, before returning to the 

 .Eolus at 2 a.m. 



An incident of navigation had rendered it necessary that 

 our ship should return to Advent Bay for a further supply 

 of coal, so now she went southward across Ice Fiord to 

 the coaling wharf, and lay there during August 6. Here, 

 tor the day, our party broke up into independent groups, 

 some climbing the high plateaus, others going up the coal- 

 mine valley to the glaciers, and the palaeontologists work- 

 ing assiduously along the Jurassic and Tertiary outcrops 

 on the slopes above the bay. Next morning we left Advent 

 Bay again for the North Branch of Ice Fiord, passing from 

 cloud and breeze into bright still sunlight, with that local 

 incidence of weather which appears to be characteristic 

 of Spitsbergen, for all day we could see the cloud-banks 

 pouring in like great glaciers from the ocean and welling 

 up against the southern shore of the fiord. 



Entering Ekman Bay, we passed along under the ice- 

 cliffs of the Sefstrom Glacier, and anchored at a spot 

 which quite recently was beneath the glacier. Above us, 

 on opposite sides of the bay, rose the exquisitely fretted 

 edges of Mt. Colosseum (i960 feet) and Mt. Capitolium 

 (2790 feet), built up of nearly level Carboniferous rocks in 

 tier after tier of belted crags, separated by high-pitched 

 slopes and notched with amazing regularity by gullies and 

 talus-cones (Fig. 2). We had seen similar features again 

 and agaii during previous days, but here the sculpturing 

 attained its greatest beauty, and the rhythm of light and 

 shadow under the low sun gave a well-nigh perfect impres- 

 sion of architectural design'. It was just the typical 

 sculpturing of an arid climate, reminding us of scenes in 

 the ' Bad Lands ' and canons of ■ western America. In 

 Spitsbergen, also, there is not sufficient precipitation to 

 maintain permanent streams except those, that have their 

 source in melting snow, and ice, so that the cones of frost- 

 riven talus everywhere accumulate on the bare slopes 

 above the over-deepened main valleys. 



As for the Sefstrom Glacier, it afforded us a series of 

 lessons of surpassing interest. 'When first mapped by 

 Prof. De Geer in 1882, the sea-front of this glacier lay 

 tw6 or three miles back within its side-valle}', and was 

 flanked on both sides by fluvio-glacial outwash plains. 

 Between that time and 1896, when it was again examined 

 by our Director, it had advanced about four miles, bury- 

 ing the outwash plains, filling its valley up to the moun- 

 tain slopes, and bulging out into Ekman I3ay in a broad 

 lobe that reached across to Cora Island, hardly a mile 

 fnjm the opposite shore of the bay. But its spurt was 

 over ; already in 1896 it was sinking back ; and when 

 visited in 1908, though its detached snout still hung 

 grounded on Cora Island amid huge masses of morainic 

 material, the main front had so far receded that there 

 was again a sea-passage between it and the island, and a 

 narrow strait, with ice-cliffs to right and left, between 

 the new front and the detached portion affixed to the 

 island. Since then there has been further recession, so 

 that we found a wider passage ; but a remnant of the 

 melting snout still shone up conspicuously amid the red 

 moraine on Cora Island. 



We spent most of the day on the island, and I know 

 that there was at least one glacialist of the party who 

 felt that the time of the whole journey would have been 

 well spent for the sake of this day alone ! In its original 

 condition Cora Island was a low spit about two miles long 

 and half a mile or more wide, composed of Carboniferous 

 limestoie partly covered with raised beach ; but it has 

 been increased to more than twice its size by the moraine 

 banked upon its western side during its invasion by the 

 glacier. This moraine, which for the greater part must 

 have been actually under the ice at its maximum, has 

 been thrown in a tumultuous succession of ridges and 

 hollows across the flank of the island, forming a curved 

 belt about three miles long, nearly half a mile wide at its 

 broadest, rising in places to 50 or 60 feet above sea-level, 

 and ending sharply, where it touches the original island. 



