Glacières; or, Freezing Caverns

by Edwin Swift Balch

The cave goes down with a steep slope from the entrance, much in the shape of a tunnel, for some ten meters. The slope was covered with slippery mud and decayed leaves, and at the bottom expanded into a little chamber, in which lay a mass of wet, compact snow, some two by three meters. It was evident that the snow was simply drifted in during the winter, and was in too large a mass and too well protected to melt easily, and there could be no question but that this place was purely a refrigerator. The air was tranquil throughout and there were no draughts. On the same day, a good breeze was blowing in the Manchester Valley.

THE FREEZING WELL OF BRANDON.

The Freezing Well of Brandon is situated on the western or southwestern outskirts of the village of Brandon, Vermont, not far from the railroad station. I visited it on the 7th of July, 1898. The well was protected by a wooden cover. On raising this, a faint stream of cool air seemed to issue forth; but this was probably only imagination. The sides, as far down as one could see, were built in with rather large blocks of stone without cement. At the bottom water was visible and there were no signs of ice. We drew up some water in a bucket, and although it was cool there was nothing icy about it. I twice lowered a thermometer nearly to the water and each time after ten minutes it registered only 13° C. There was certainly nothing abnormal in this temperature, in fact it was strictly normal and my thermometer showed conclusively by its actions that it could not have been near any ice mass. The people at the house, however, assured me that a month before there was ice in the well.

Afterwards I called on Mr. C. O. Luce, the owner of the well. He stated that it was eleven and a half meters deep to the bottom, that it was dug in 1858, and that the ground through which it goes was found frozen at a depth of about four and a half meters. Here there is a stratum of gravel and this is where the freezing occurs. Mr. Luce thought that the water was under the ice, that is, that the water came up from the bottom. He said also that the well usually froze solid in winter; but, that as this winter was an open one, there was less ice this year than usual. He thought that there was less ice anyway now than in former years, partly because of the cover which was put over the well, and which keeps out some of the cold; and partly because a neighboring gravel hillock, called the Hogback, was a good deal cut away, and this in some way affects the supply of cold in the gravel. He added that the sandy soil round Brandon does not as a rule freeze to a greater depth than two meters each winter. The house built beside the well was said to be comfortable in winter.

There seems no doubt that this is another refrigerator. The cold water of the winter snows percolates into the gravel mass and refreezes, and, owing to the bad conductive quality of the material, the gravel remains frozen later than the soil elsewhere in the neighborhood. The fact that the well went through a frozen gravel stratum when dug, proves that it is not alone the air that sinks into the well itself, which makes the ice. The fact that the well freezes on the whole less than formerly, apparently partly owing to the digging up of some of the gravel close by, goes to prove the same thing. The fact that the well generally freezes solid every winter, shows that although some of the gravel mass possibly remains frozen all the time, much of the ice is renewed each year. This is especially important as proving that the ice found in gravel deposits is due to the cold of winter and not to a glacial period, although, of course, no one could say for how long a time the ice was forming and melting; and this process might date back to the time of the formation of the gravel mass.

I could learn nothing of any similar place near Brandon, except that Mr. Luce said that in an old abandoned silver mine in the neighborhood, he had once seen ice during hot weather.

FREEZING TALUS ON LOWER AUSABLE POND.

On the eastern side of Lower Ausable Pond, Essex County, New York, at the foot of Mount Sébille or Colvin, there is a talus of great Laurentian boulders, which fell from the mountain and lie piled up on the edge of the lake. Among these boulders, at a distance of about five hundred meters from the southern end of the lake, there are spaces, several of which might be called caves, although they are really hollows between the boulders. On the 12th of July, 1898, I visited this spot with Mr. Edward I. H. Howell of Philadelphia. From several of the rock cracks we found a draught of air flowing strongly out, as tested by the smoke of a cigar. The air was distinctly icy and there could be no question that there was a considerable quantity of ice among the rocks to produce the temperature.

In three places we found masses of ice. One of these hollows was small, and the other two were much larger. One of the latter was almost round in shape, and perhaps three meters in diameter; with a little snow near the mouth and with plenty of ice at the bottom. The other was a long descending crack between two boulders which joined overhead, and with the bottom filled by a long, narrow slope of ice, perhaps seventy-five centimeters in width and six meters in length, set at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. The ice was hard and non-prismatic.