Oh. XI.] ICE OF GREENLAND. 145 



The outskirts, where the Danish colonists are settled, comprise an 

 area of 30,000 square miles in extent, including many islands and 

 peninsulas, and some fiords from 50 to 100 miles long, down which 

 the ice passes, either floating or sometimes, as already stated, in con- 

 tact with the bottom. Rink counted twenty-two great ice-streams 

 along the coast, which indicate the position of as many concealed val- 

 leys or straths, by which relief is given to the snow and ice annually 

 accumulating in the interior. From the same points the principal 

 glaciers or rivers would issue if, at some future period, there should be 

 a milder climate. But although the direction of. the ice-streams in 

 Greenland may concide in the main with that which separate glaciers 

 would, take if there were no more ice than there is now in the Swiss 

 Alps, yet the striation of the surface of the rocks on an ice-clad con- 

 tinent would, on the whole, vary considerably in its minor details 

 from that which would be imprinted on rocks constituting a region 

 of separate glaciers. For where there is a universal covering of ice 

 there will be a general outward movement from the higher and 

 more central regions toward the circumference and lower country, 

 and this movement will be, to a certain extent, independent of the 

 minor inequalities of hill and valley, when these are all reduced to 

 one level by the snow. The moving ice may sometimes cross even 

 at right angles deep narrow ravines, or the crests of buried ridges, 

 on which last it may afterward seem strange to detect glacial stria? 

 and polishing after the liquefaction of the snow and ice has taken 

 place. 



Rink mentions that, in North Greenland, powerful springs of 

 clayey water escape in winter from under the ice, where it descends 

 to " the outskirts," and where, as already stated, it is often 2000 feet 

 thick — a fact showing- how much grinding action is going on upon the 

 surface of the subjacent rocks. I also learn from Dr. Torell that 

 there are large areas in the outskirts, now no longer covered with 

 permanent snow or glaciers, which exhibit on their surface unmistak- 

 able signs of ancient ice-action, so that, vast as is the power now ex- 

 erted by ice in Greenland, it must once have operated on a still grand- 

 er scale. The land, though now very elevated, may perhaps have 

 been formerly much higher. This, indeed, is more than probable, as, 

 ever since the country has been known to the Danes, or for the 

 last four centuries, the whole coast, from latitude 60° to about 70° 

 N. has been sinking at the rate of several feet in a century. By 

 this means a surface of rock, well scored and polished by ice, is now 

 slowly subsiding beneath the sea, and is becoming strewed over, as 

 the icebergs melt, with impalpable mud and smoothed and scratched 

 stones. 



"When we contemplate, therefore, the effects which are now in pro- 

 gress in North Greenland and on its shores, as well as in the bed of 

 the adjoining sea, under the influence of the ice, both of glaciers and 

 floating bergs, combined with a vertical movement of the continent 

 10 



