“It was slowly that the conviction dawned on me that I was looking upon the counterpart of the great river-system of Arctic Asia and America. Yet here were no water-feeders from the south. Every particle of moisture had its origin within the polar circle and had been converted into ice. There were no vast alluvions, no forest or animal traces borne down by liquid torrents. Here was a plastic, moving, semi-solid mass, obliterating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march through the crust of an investing sea.”[AL]
[AL] Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, 1854, and 1855, vol. i, pp. 225-228.
Much less is known concerning the eastern coast of Greenland than about the western coast. For a long time it was supposed that there might be a considerable population in the lower latitudes along the eastern side. But that is now proved to be a mistake. The whole coast is very inhospitable and difficult of approach. From latitude 65° to latitude 69° little or nothing is known of it. In 1822-’23 Scoresby, Cleavering, and Sabine hastily explored the coast from latitude 69° to 76°, and reported numerous glaciers descending to the sea-level through extensive fiords, from which immense icebergs float out and render navigation dangerous. In 1869 and 1870 the second North-German Expedition partly explored the coast between latitude 73° and 77°. Mr. Payer, an experienced Alpine explorer, who accompanied the expedition, reports the country as much broken, and the glaciers as “subordinated in position to the higher peaks, and having their moraines, both lateral and terminal, like those of the Alpine ranges, and on a still grander scale.” Petermann Peak, in latitude 73°, is reported as 13,000 feet high. Captain Koldewey, chief of the expedition, found extensive plateaus on the mainland, in latitude 75°, to be “entirely clear of snow, although only sparsely covered with vegetation.” The mountains in this vicinity, also, rising to a height of more than 2,000 feet, were free from snow in the summer. Some of the fiords in this vicinity penetrate the continent through several degrees of longitude.
An interesting episode of this expedition was the experience of the crew of the ship Hansa, which was caught in the ice and destroyed. The crew, however, escaped by encamping on the ice-floe which had crushed the ship. From this, as it slowly floated towards the south through several degrees of latitude, they had opportunity to make many important observations upon the continent itself. As viewed from this unique position the coast had the appearance everywhere of being precipitous, with mountains of considerable height rising in the background, from which numerous small glaciers descended to the sea-level.
In 1888 Dr. F. Nansen, with Lieutenant Sverdrup and four others, was left by a whaler on the ice-pack bordering the east of Greenland about latitude 65°, and in sight of the coast. For twelve days the party was on the ice-pack floating south, and so actually reached the coast only about latitude 64°. From this point they attempted to cross the inland ice in a northwesterly direction towards Christianshaab. They soon reached a height of 7,000 feet, and were compelled by severe northerly storms to diverge from their course, taking a direction more to the west. The greatest height attained was 9,500 feet, and the party arrived on the western coast at Ameralik Fiord, a little south of Godhaab, about the same latitude at which they entered.
It thus appears that subsequent investigations have confirmed in a remarkable manner the sagacious conclusions made by the eminent Scotch geologist and glacialist Robert Brown in 1875, soon after his own expedition to the country. “I look upon Greenland and its interior ice-field,” he writes, "in the light of a broad-lipped, shallow vessel, but with chinks in the lips here and there, and the glacier like viscous matter in it. As more is poured in, the viscous matter will run over the edges, naturally taking the line of the chinks as its line of outflow. The broad lips of the vessel are the outlying islands or ‘outskirts’; the viscous matter in the vessel the inland ice, the additional matter continually being poured in in the form of the enormous snow covering, which, winter after winter, for seven or eight months in the year, falls almost continuously on it; the chinks are the fiords or valleys down which the glaciers, representing the outflowing viscous matter, empty the surplus of the vessel—in other words, the ice floats out in glaciers, overflows the land in fact, down the valleys and fiords of Greenland by force of the superincumbent weight of snow, just as does the grain on the floor of a barn (as admirably described by Mr. Jamieson) when another sackful is emptied on the top of the mound already on the floor. ‘The floor is flat, and therefore does not conduct the grain in any direction; the outward motion is due to the pressure of the particles of grain on one another; and, given a floor of infinite extension and a pile of sufficient amount, the mass would move outward to any distance, and with a very slight pitch or slope it would slide forward along the incline.’ To this let me add that if the floor on the margin of the heap of grain was undulating the stream of grain would take the course of such undulations. The want, therefore, of much slope in a country and the absence of any great mountain-range are of very little moment to the movement of land-ice, provided we have snow enough" On another page Dr. Brown had well said that “the country seems only a circlet of islands separated from one another by deep fiords or straits, and bound together on the landward side by the great ice covering which overlies the whole interior.... No doubt under this ice there lies land, just as it lies under the sea; but nowadays none can be seen, and as an insulating medium it might as well be water.”
In his recently published volumes descriptive of the journey across the Greenland ice-sheet, alluded to on [page 39], Dr. Nansen sums up his inferences in very much the same way: “The ice-sheet rises comparatively abruptly from the sea on both sides, but more especially on the east coast, while its central portion is tolerably flat. On the whole, the gradient decreases the farther one gets into the interior, and the mass thus presents the form of a shield with a surface corrugated by gentle, almost imperceptible, undulations lying more or less north and south, and with its highest point not placed symmetrically, but very decidedly nearer the east coast than the west.”
From this rapid glance at the existing glaciers of the world we see that a great ice age is not altogether a strange thing in the world. The lands about the south pole and Greenland are each continental in dimensions, and present at the present time accumulations of land-ice so extensive, so deep, and so alive with motion as to prepare our minds for almost anything that may be suggested concerning the glaciated condition of other portions of the earth’s surface. The vera causa is sufficient to accomplish anything of which glacialists have ever dreamed. It only remains to enquire what the facts really are and over how great an extent of territory the actual results of glacial action may be found. But we will first direct more particular attention to some of the facts and theories concerning glacial motion.