A herd of musk ox in full flight.These" sheep-oxen" are true 

 relics of the Ice Age and. though they look lumpish, can out- 

 pace most other animals. 



squeezed out underneath as taffy would be in a shallow bowl if 

 a large solid weight were placed upon it. 



Thus an icecap grows in both depth and area and pushes out 

 in all directions. If it comes against a substantial mountain range, 

 it pushes up and over the lower passes or flows around the ob- 

 stacle, scouring its sides with millions of tons of pressure and 

 billion-foot-pound scooping actions. It finally covers the whole land 

 and leaves only the peaks of the tallest mountains sticking out. 

 These are called nunataks. Such are strewn all around the edge 

 of Greenland. But finally its edge reaches some seacoast. If the 

 coast is a rocky barrier with cliffs, the ice, in the form of glaciers 

 or rivers of ice, cascades down these through whatever gaps 

 there are and, on reaching the sea below, becomes water-borne — 

 ice being lighter than water. As a result, the front ends or 

 "tongues" of these break off in great bits by being bent upward, 

 often with thunderous noises like gunfire, and then go drifting 

 away as icebergs. This is called calving. 



If. on the other hand, the coast is low but wide, the ice front 

 may push slowly out onto it, building up a mountainous and 

 bulbous front, actually thicker at that front than just behind it, 

 so that the whole curls over like a vast wave and huge masses 

 of ice crash to the bare ground ahead of it. Then the ice slowly 

 creeps over these chunks and reabsorbs them. In still other cir- 

 cumstances, where the coastal plain is narrow and only just 

 above sea level and extends out under the water to form a very 

 shallow sea, the vast ice mass may move slowly out from the 

 land — sometimes for hundreds of miles as in the Antarctic — 

 before its buoyancy counteracts its weight and vast slices of it 

 snap off and become water-borne. This is known as shelf ice; 

 and it is prevalent around enormous stretches of the Antarctic 

 coast but it is not found in the Arctic. When this shelf ice — 

 sometimes hundreds of feet thick — breaks away, it forms flat- 

 topped icebergs that have been recorded up to two hundred 

 miles long and a hundred miles wide. 



Sooner or later, however, the climate changes once more and 

 the icecap begins to suffer starvation. Perhaps nothing more than 

 a diminution in annual precipitation takes place, so that no new 

 snow piles up on the center or it does so in such small quantities 

 that it cannot keep up with the summer thaw. Then the move- 

 ment of the ice ceases; its peripheral glaciers melt backward up 

 their gorges; on low land, its bulbous front flattens out into a 

 thin, tapering sheet and develops melt caves beneath it; and the 

 great ice shelves begin to slant downward to the sea and then 

 slowly retreat back onto the land. Such is Greenland today — 

 though perhaps only temporarily — a really vast and fairly an- 

 cient icecap just a little past its prime, shrinking visibly almost 

 all around and with considerably reduced edges on land but still 

 calving icebergs along both its northwestern and eastern coasts. 

 An icy blanket of air still pours off its edges in most places force- 

 fully enough to be termed idiabatic winds, but it is not nearly so 

 formidable or aggressive as it was even a century ago. 



Things have been warming up generally in those parts for 

 some time now, so that all manner of animals once found only 

 in temperate seas now occur there. Codfish, which only fifty years 

 ago were never caught north of 64 degrees north, now form com- 

 mercial catches north of 73 degrees north. This is a tremendous 

 movement for fish, which are ultrasensitive to water tempera- 

 tures, being nearly six hundred miles of latitude. All kinds of 

 other changes have been taking place, too. The sea ice has 



become thinner and narrower, and it melts sooner and stays 

 away for longer periods than it did previously. This has upset 

 the inshore habits of such marine mammals as whales and seals. 

 The graves of the Norse settlers of pre-Columbian times have 

 thawed out of the permafrost; quite a number of new plants 

 have appeared on the coastal fringe in summer; and birds not 

 seen before are now common in many areas. These are not 

 unalloyed blessings: rather the contrary, for they have removed 

 far to the north many of the natural products, such as whales 

 and seals, on which the Greenlanders relied for food and cloth- 

 ing. Much the same is happening on the Canadian islands, but 

 the change there is not so apparent and is possibly not so pro- 

 found. In Greenland it seems to be caused primarily by changes 

 in the warmer ocean currents and the wilting of the icecap, and 

 it is believed that it is not an increase of warm water but of cold 

 that is causing the latter, for as the warm water goes farther 

 away it carries the moisture-laden air that brings precipitation. 



GARDENS BY THE ICE 



The coastal strips of Greenland are very unlike what most of us 

 suppose. Even in midwinter the climate is not really any colder 

 than that of the northern United States, and in summer it can 

 be very (though never disagreeably) hot, so that people go swim- 

 ming in lakes and wander about in shorts even as far north as 

 upper Baffin Bay. There are places within the Arctic Circle that 



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