84 BEACH GRASS 



falls, the beach becomes coated with ice of 

 fantastic design. Each receding wave is marked 

 by an arc of frozen foam. In continued cold 

 weather, the coating on the beach gradually 

 builds up, augmented by the icy slush and cakes 

 left by the ebbing tide. All is so solidly frozen 

 to the sand that it remains a bottom ice at flood 

 tide. A shelf of ice may extend a little way 

 out over the water forming, what is called in 

 arctic regions, an ice foot. 



At times great cakes of ice break away from 

 their anchors and, buoyed up by the water, bring 

 up sand, pebbles, and boulders. After the 

 severe winter of 1917-18 the beach at Ipswich 

 to a distance of two miles below the pebbly and 

 boulder-strewn shore at the foot of Castle Hill, 

 was dotted in places with pebbles and boulders. 

 These must have been carried by the ground ice 

 with the falling tide and dropped later on the 

 sand. One unfamiliar with this winter phenom- 

 enon might be at a loss to explain the presence 

 of a boulder four feet long and about three feet 

 thick that I found on the smooth sand beach, 

 some two miles from the nearest boulder region 



