As special characters he points out, first, the rarity of needles and prisms of ice, which he attributes to the slight inclination and the uniformity of the slopes, as well as to the diminution of the solar heat, which, even in the long summer days, does not melt the surface. There are no rills or streams capable of hollowing out crevasses and moulding protuberances or projections. But transversal crevasses produced by the movement of the glaciers are numerous, and these are often very wide and very deep.
GLACIER, ENGLISH BAY, SPITZBERGEN.
In the terminal escarpment, which melts in proportion as it plunges into the sea, immense caverns are sometimes seen; caverns so immense that the azure-gleaming grottoes of the Arveiron and Grindelwald, so much admired by European travellers, are but miniatures. “One day,” says Charles Martins, “after having ascertained the temperature of the sea off the great glacier of Bell Sound, I proposed to the sailors who accompanied me to carry our boat into its cavern. I explained to them the risk we should incur, being unwilling to attempt anything without their consent. When our boat had crossed the threshold, we found ourselves in an immense Gothic cathedral; long conical-pointed cylinders of ice descended from the roof; the recesses seemed so many chapels opening out of the principal nave; broad fissures divided the walls, and the open intervals, like arches, sprang towards the summits; azure gleams played over the icy surface, and were reflected in the water. The sailors, like myself, were dumb with admiration. But a too prolonged contemplation would have been dangerous; we soon regained the narrow opening through which we had penetrated into this winter temple, and, returning on board our vessel, preserved a discreet silence respecting an escapade which might have been justly blamed. In the evening, we saw from the shore our cathedral of the morning slowly bend forwards, detach itself from the parent glacier, crash into the waves, and reappear in a thousand blocks and fragments of ice, which the retiring tide carried slowly out to sea.”
The Spitzbergen glaciers do not exhibit those numerous moraines which are observed on the majority of those of Switzerland.
The mountains, not being very lofty, are buried, as it were, under their burden of glaciers, instead of preponderating over them, and seem with difficulty to lift their peaks out of the mass of ice and snow surrounding them. Consequently, there are no considerable landslips or falls of earth and stone, which, accumulating along the borders of the glaciers, might form moraines. Martins is of opinion that the Spitzbergen glaciers correspond to the upper part of the glaciers of Switzerland; to so much, that is to say, as lies above the perpetual snow-line.
Now, he says, the higher we ascend on an Alpine glacier, the more do the lateral and medial moraines diminish in width and form, until they taper away and finally disappear under the high névés of the amphitheatres from which the glacier issues, just as the mountain torrents often take their rise in one or in several lakes terraced one above the other.
GLACIER, BELL SOUND, SPITZBERGEN.
For all these reasons, he adds, the medial and lateral moraines are scarcely conspicuous on the glaciers of Spitzbergen; a number of stones and boulders may be seen along their sides, and sometimes in their centre, but the ice is never hidden, as in the Alps, under the mass of débris accumulated upon it. As for the terminal moraines, they must be sought at the bottom of the sea, since the terminal escarpment nearly always overhangs it. Hence, the blocks of stone fall simultaneously with the blocks of ice, and form a submarine frontal moraine, of which the two extremities are occasionally visible upon the shore.