MURDOCH.) CLIMATE. all 
when the sun is continually above the horizon, and for about a month 
before and after this period the twilight is so bright all night that no 
stars are visible. 
The snowfall during the winter is comparatively small. There is 
probably not more than a foot of snow on a level anywhere on the land, 
though it is extremely difficult to measure or estimate, as it is so fine 
and dry that it is easily moved by the wind and is constantly in motion; 
forming deep, heavy, hard drifts under all the banks, while many ex- 
posed places, especially the top of the sand beach, are swept entirely 
clean. The snow begins to soften and melt about the first week in 
April, but goes off very slowly, so that the ground is not wholly bare 
before the middle or end of June. The grass, however, begins to turn 
green early in June, and a few flowers are seen in blossom as early as 
June 7 or 8. 
Rain begins to fall as early as April, but cold, snowy days are not un- 
common later than that date. There isa good deal of clear, calm weather 
during the winter, and extremely low temperatures are seldom accom- 
panied by high wind. Violent storms are not uncommon, however, 
especially in November, during the latter part of January, and in Feb- 
ruary. One gale from the south and southwest, which occurred January 
22, 1882, reached a velocity of 100 miles an hour. The most agreeable 
season of the year is between the middle of May and the end of July, 
when the seaopens. After this thereis much foggy and cloudy weather. 
Fresh-water ponds begin to freeze about the last week in September, 
and by the first or second week in October everything is sufticiently 
frozen for the natives to travel with sledges to fish through the ice of 
theinlandrivers. Melting begins with the thawing of the snow, but the 
larger ponds are not clear of ice till the middle or end of July. The sea 
in most seasons is permanently closed by freezing and the moying in of 
heavy ice fields from about the middle of October to the end of July. 
The heavy ice in ordinary seasons does not move very far from the shore, 
while the sea is more or less encumbered with floating masses all summer. 
These usually ground on a bar which runs from the Seahorse Islands 
along the shore parallel to it and about 1,000 yards distant, forming a 
“barrier” or “land-floe” of high, broken hummocks, inshore of which 
the sea freezes over smooth and undisturbed by the pressure of the 
outer pack. 
Sometimes, however, the heavy pack, under the pressure of violent and 
long-continued westerly winds, pushes across the bar and is forced up 
on the beach. The ice sometimes comes in with great rapidity. The 
natives informed us that a year or two before the station was established 
the heavy ice came in against the village cliffs, tearing away part of the 
bank and destroying a house on the edge of the cliff so suddenly that 
one of the inmates, a large, stout man, was unable to escape through the 
trap-door and was crushed to death. Outside of the land-floe the ice is 
a broken pack, consisting of hummocks of fragmentary old and new ice, 
interspersed with comparatively level fields of the former. During the 
