IX.] 
BAY AND SEA ICE. 
425 
have there been exposed to a comparatively early summer heat. 
The bay ice therefore melts away completely during summer, 
and it is not commonly much pressed together. When all the 
snow upon it has disappeared, there is to be seen’ above the 
surface of the water a little ice of the same colour as the water, 
while under water very considerable portions of ilnmelted hard 
ice are still remaining. This has given rise to the walrus- 
hunters’ statement, which has been warmly maintained, that the 
ice in autumn finally disappears by sinking. Nearly all the ice 
we met with in the course of our voj^age belonged to this 
variety. 
6. Sea Ice, or heavy ice, which often exhibits traces of having- 
been much pressed together, but has not been exposed to any 
early summer heat. The walrus-hunters call it sea ice, wishing, 
I imagine, to indicate thereby that it is formed in the sea 
farther up towards the north] That it has drifted down from 
the north is indeed correct, but that it has been formed far 
from land over a considerable depth in the open sea is perhaps 
uncertain, as the ice that is formed there cannot, we think, 
be very thick. It has rather perhaps drifted down from the 
neighbourhood of some yet unknown Polar continent. Of 
this ice are formed most of the ice-fields in the seas east 
of Greenland, north of Spitzbergen, between Spitzbergen and 
the north island of Novaya Zemlya, and north of Behring’s 
Straits. In the northern seas it does not melt completely 
during the summer, and remains of sea ice therefore often 
enter as component parts into the bay ice formed during the 
following winter. The latter then becomes rough and uneven, 
from remnants of old sea ice being frozen into the newly formed 
ice. Sea ice is often pressed together so as to form great 
tcrosses or ice-casts, formed of pieces of ice which at first are 
angular and piled loose on each other, but gradually become 
rounded, and freeze together into enormous blocks of ice, which, 
together with the glacier ice-blocks, form the principal mass 
