370 Modern Large Glaciers. 



birth to a prodigious number of large glaciers, many of 

 which protrude far into the Fiords, while very many 

 others on a smaller scale descend directly into the sea 

 from the mountains on either side. In other cases, as 

 on straight parts of the coast of Melville Bay, the 

 glacier-ice crowns the cliffs for miles, and breaking off 

 in masses, falls in cataracts of small-shivered icebergs 

 into the ssa, grinding and smoothing the rock as they 

 descend. But in the same region when broad valleys 

 open out towards the sea, then it frequently happens 

 that prodigious glaciers push their way out far beyond 

 the shore. These are in some cases 12 or 20 miles 

 across at their ends, and in the case of the great Hum- 

 boldt glacier, 60 miles across, ending in a cliff of ice in 

 places 300 feet in height. One of these vast glaciers has 

 been estimated as being at the very least 3,000 feet in 

 thickness. Great masses of ice breaking away from 

 their ends form icebergs, which, sometimes laden with 

 moraine rubbish, like that which partly covers the 

 glaciers of Switzerland, float out into the Greenland 

 seas, and are carried south by a current in Baffin's Bay. 

 Not infrequently icebergs float far into the Atlantic, 

 beyond the parallel of New York, and they have been 

 seen even off the Azores. 



Along the shores also, when the sea freezes, the ice 

 becomes attached to the coast. By-and-by, as summer 

 comes on, the ice partly breaks away, leaving what is 

 called an ice-foot still joined to the land. Vast quan- 

 tities of debris during part of the year fall from the 

 cliffs, and are lodged upon the ice-foot, and when it 

 breaks off and floats away and melts, the rubbish is 

 strewn about, and accumulates on the bottom of Baffin's 

 Bay. In like manner the icebergs melt chiefly in Baffin's 

 Bay, but sometimes escaping from thence and melting 



