Glacières; or, Freezing Caverns

by Edwin Swift Balch

The snow and ice slope fell in a series of small waves, and the upper portion was rather dirty. On the right hand the workmen had fixed a rope as a handrail, and all the way down had cut a staircase in the ice, so that the descent was not difficult. Some of the ice was sloppy. The ice mass did not abut entirely against the end of the cave, but left an open space between the ice and the rock, some three or four meters wide and some four or five meters deep. Here the workmen had been getting their ice, and had cut into the ice mass for several meters, forming a little tunnel.

There were no ice cones nor stalactites, neither did I see any limestone stalactites. Much of the ice was prismatic; in fact, together with that at Saint-Georges, it was the most strongly prismatic I have seen. I can perhaps best describe it, by saying that it was brittle in texture, as I could break up small lumps in my hands. There was more prismatic ice at Saint-Livres, however, than at Saint-Georges. The air in the cave was still and decidedly damp; and the temperature was several degrees above freezing point. The day, however, was almost windless, and I would not assert that movements of air, due to the wind, might not sometimes take place in the pit.

The Glacière du Pré de Saint-Livres is one of those caves which may be looked on as a transitional form between gorges containing ice and caves containing ice. The winter snow falls into the mouth of the pit, and is the chief foundation of the ice mass. It would be interesting to make a series of observations in this cave to see whether there was anything like glacier motion. Émery, of his own accord, expressed the opinion that much of the ice here was due to the winter snows; in fact, he thought that it was all due to it, and that it gradually descended into the cave and turned, little by little, into ice. He told me that some years ago a cow was found by the workmen, frozen into the ice, at a depth of four meters; the flesh was perfectly preserved, and was eaten. I asked him if he had ever seen insects in either cave, and he said he had not.

From the glacière we walked back to the village of Saint-Georges. On asking my guide how much I owed him, he said he received four francs for a journée, so I gave him six francs, and we parted the best of friends.

GLACIER ICE CAVE IN THE FEE GLACIER.

During a rather protracted stay at Saas-Fee in Switzerland, I visited the glacier ice cave of the Fee Glacier on the 15th and 16th of August, 1897, both cool and rainy days. It is about half an hour’s walk from the hotel to the ice cave, which is in the snout of the Fee glacier, below the Eggfluh. A considerable stream issued from the cave. On nearing the opening, a strong cold air current poured out above the stream. At the front edge of the ice, the height of the ice roof in the centre was perhaps twelve meters and the width fifteen meters. Around the edge, the roof formed an almost perfect curve. The ice walls contracted in a regular manner within, and the cave became narrower and lower, and suggested an enormous funnel cut in half, into which you looked from the larger end. The cave also grew gradually darker, and the darkness prevented seeing further than to a depth of some fifteen meters. In the ice walls, just inside the entrance, were several crevasses, of the ordinary blue-green color. They followed nearly the same curve as the roof, but did not go through to the outside. There were no icicles. The ice was faintly stratified in places, and at the outer edge was brittle. It did not break into the long narrow prisms of the ice at Saint-Georges and the Pré de Saint-Livres, but rather into small lumps with facets, of all sorts of shapes. It was evidently unsafe to penetrate under the ice roof, for while I stood in front of the cave, a large lump broke off from the roof and fell with a clatter among a lot of other ice fragments already on the moraine floor. In two places there was a steady rain of drops from the roof, showing that the ice was melting.

This is perhaps the glacier cave in Switzerland which is easiest to visit, and my inspection intensified my belief in what I consider the correct explanation of some of the phenomena in glacières. The suggestion was that as soon as the temperature gets above freezing point in a glacier ice cave, the only process is that of destruction of the ice, which seems to be also the case with glacières.

LA GRAND CAVE DE MONTARQUIS.

My brother and I left Cluses, in Savoie, a railroad station on the line between Geneva and Chamonix, at two o’clock on the afternoon of the 22d of August, 1897, and drove up in two hours and a half to Pralong du Reposoir, a distance of eleven kilometers. The road is a route nationale, fine and broad, with parapets in many places. After passing Scionzier, it mounts gradually, passing through a tremendous wild gorge, cut by the waters and heavily clad with firs. We reached Pralong at four-thirty, and stopped at a primitive inn, still in process of construction, and tenanted only by blue-bloused peasants, who, as it was Sunday night, sat up late, drinking and making a heathenish noise they mistook for singing. I talked to some of these men, and they all insisted that there was no ice at the Grand Cave in winter, but that it came in summer. Plus il fait chaud, plus ça gêle, they said. One man explained the formation of the ice in an original way, and with an intelligence far above that of the average peasant. He considered that it was due to air currents, and thought that in winter the snow stopped up the holes in the rocks, through which the currents came; but that when the snow melted, the draughts could work, and that then they formed the ice.