698 THK WORT,D*S WONDERS. 



ICEBERGS AND WOXDKKFUL ICE FORMATIONS. 



THE Arctic world is full of pulseless wonders, staid and insen- 

 sate things of nature, which move upon the waters with a majesty 

 awesome and grand. Ice is king in this frosty realm, and he 

 gives strange evidences of his mighty power. More dangerous 

 than hidden shoals and sunken cliffs to the navigator are the 

 floating islands of ice which swing about and grind one another, 

 or break up and fall with a force that will crush any ship. Arctic 

 navigators have given various names to these movable shoals, 

 which are the cause of so much delay and danger. They are 

 icebergs when they tower to a considerable height above the 

 waters, and ice-fields when they have a vast horizontal extension. 

 A floe is a detached portion of a field ; pack-ice, a large area of 

 floes or smaller fragments closely driven together so as to oppose 

 a firm barrier to the progress of a ship ; and drift-ice, loose ice 

 in motion, but not so firmly packed as to prevent a vessel from 

 making her way through its yielding masses. 



The large ice-fields which the whaler encounters in Baffin's 

 Bay, or on the seas between Spitzbergen and Greenland, consti- 

 tute one of the marvels of the deep. There is a solemn grandeur 

 in the slow, majestic motion with which they are drifted by the 

 current to the south ; and their enormous masses, as mile after 

 mile comes floating by, impress the spectator with the idea of a 

 boundless extent and an irresistible power. But, vast and mighty 

 as they are, they are unable to withstand the elements combined 

 for their destruction, and their apparently triumphal march leads 

 them only to their ruin. 



When they first descend from their northern strongholds, the 

 ice of which they are composed is of the average thickness of 

 from ten to fifteen feet, and their surface is sometimes tolerably 

 smooth and even, but in general it is covered with numberless 

 ice-blocks, or hummocks, piled upon each other in wild confu- 

 sion to a height of forty or fifty feet, the result of repeated col- 

 lisions before flakes and floes were soldered into fields. Before 

 the end of June they are covered with snow, sometimes six feet 



