254 THE ANTARCTIC. 



seen most frequently. Drygalski has collected very 

 instructive instances for such kind of formations in 

 Greenland. We must forbear describing these highly 

 interesting phenomena from want of space, but we may 

 hold fast to the theory that the alternate white and blue 

 sheets of Antarctic ice are due to real stratification, 

 different from the structure of blue foliations of the 

 Alpine glaciers which are mostly traceable to the 

 movements of the glaciers. 



With respect to the distribution of the land ice, and 

 its descent to the coast, a marked difference is noticeable 

 between the Arctic and Antarctic regions. As far as it 

 is known, the Greenland ice nowhere reaches the coast 

 in an unbroken mass ; only in the valleys of the fjords, 

 which cut deeply into its edge, the ice, rent by mighty 

 clefts, falls sheer into the sea. Numerous rocky summits, 

 the so-called Nunatak, raise their bare heads within the 

 whole circuit of this terminal zone, and not till a long way 

 inland do we find that the ice has a compact surface free 

 from clefts. In the Antarctic regions, on the contrary, 

 we do not meet, as has so often been asserted, an ice 

 cap covering the whole land and hiding all differences 

 of level, but an ice mantle which, no doubt, fully envelops 

 the country, but adapts itself to the large configurations 

 of the ground without obliterating them. This is clearly 

 obvious from all the descriptions, both verbal and pictorial. 

 The information we possess at present does not enable 

 us to account for this, but the nature of the ice in the 

 interior will be one of the problems that future investigators 

 will have to study. It may perhaps be ascribed to 

 the almost universally low summer temperatures in the 

 far south and along the coast, and to the same cause 

 may be due the apparently slow motion of the inland ice 

 in the Antarctic lands, which may be inferred from the 

 regular horizontal stratification exhibited by the icebergs. 



As might have been expected, nothing has as yet 



