ON SOME PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF ICE 



MOTONORI MATSUYAMA 



University of Chicago 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY T. C. CHAMBERLIN 



While many of the more obvious problems of ice and ice action have 

 been solved in a general way, there remain not a few questions of a more 

 refined sort which require solution before glaciology can rest on a secure 

 foundation. Some of these questions are critically important for they bear 

 radically on interpretations that have already been widely accepted and are 

 currently taught. More extended and more critical field studies are required 

 to solve some of these questions while the solution of others depends on more 

 discriminative and exact laboratory experimentation. All of them call for 

 more searching analyses of the problems themselves, as a source of guidance 

 in field work and in experimentation, as also in the interpretation of results. 

 The glaciahsts working at Chicago have been trying to do their bit toward 

 the solution of some of these problems and have had under way for some 

 time a series of attacks along several lines in both field and laboratory. This 

 paper presents the preliminary results of a careful series of laboratory determi- 

 nations carried out by Professor Motonori Matsuyama, of the Department 

 of Geophysics of the Kyoto Imperial University, Japan, who has been spending 

 the year at Chicago. 



When McConnell, followed by Miigge, announced that ice crystals are 

 minutely laminated in planes normal to their optical axes and that movement 

 along these planes was notably easier than in other directions, it was felt by 

 many that these disclosures offered a happy solution of the anomaly of glacial 

 movement which seemed to be a quasi-fluidal flow in a body obviously rigid. 

 But later critical studies raised serious doubts as to the actual participation 

 of the gliding planes in ordinary glacial motion, and so the subject came to 

 demand more refined examination. Up to date, no one, so far as I know, 

 has determined what is the measure of the resistance to motion along these 

 planes compared with the stresses actually brought to bear upon them in 

 ordinary glacial motion. Nor has it been shown whether the relation of these 

 gliding planes to one another is of the elastic or the viscous order. But even 

 if these properties were known, there would still remain the radical question 

 whether glacial motion actually takes place by means of movements along 

 these planes — or in any other way within the constituent crystals — or whether 

 it is essentially a motion between the constituent crystals. There are here 



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