[§ 49.] Sea Ice and Icebergs.
338. We are now equipped intellectually for a campaign into another territory. Water becomes heavier and more difficult to freeze when salt is dissolved in it. Sea water is therefore heavier than fresh, and the Greenland Ocean requires to freeze it a temperature 3½ degrees lower than fresh water. When concentrated till its specific gravity reaches 1.1045, sea water requires for its congelation a temperature 18⅓ degrees lower than the ordinary freezing-point.[E]
[E] Scoresby.
339. But even when the water is saturated with salt, the crystallising force studiously rejects the salt, and devotes itself to the congelation of the water alone. Hence the ice of sea water, when melted, produces fresh water. The only saline particles existing in such ice are those entangled 'mechanically in its pores. They have no part or lot in the structure of the crystal.
340. This exclusiveness, if I may use the term, of the water molecules; this entire rejection of all foreign elements from the edifices which they build, is enforced to a surprising degree. Sulphuric acid has so strong an affinity for water that it is one of the most powerful agents known to the chemist for the removal of humidity from air. Still, as shown by Faraday, when a mixture of sulphuric acid and water is frozen, the crystal formed is perfectly sweet and free from acidity. The water alone has lent itself to the crystallising force.
341. Every winter in the Arctic regions the sea freezes, roofing itself with ice of enormous thickness and vast extent. By the summer heat, and the tossing of the waves, this is broken up; the fragments are drifted by winds and borne by currents. They clash, they crush each other, they pile themselves into heaps, thus constituting the chief danger encountered by mariners in the polar seas.
342. But among the drifting masses of flat sea-ice, vaster masses sail, which spring from a totally different source. These are the Icebergs of the Arctic seas. They rise sometimes to an elevation of hundreds of feet above the water, while the weight of ice submerged is about seven times that seen above.
343. The first observers of striking natural phenomena generally allow wonder and imagination more than their due place. But to exclude all error arising from this cause, I will refer to the journal of a cool and intrepid Arctic navigator, Sir Leopold McClintock. He describes an iceberg 250 feet high, which was aground in 500 feet of water. This would make the entire height of the berg 750 feet, not an unusual altitude for the greater icebergs.
344. From Baffin's Bay these mighty masses come sailing down through Davis' Straits into the broad Atlantic. A vast amount of heat is demanded for the simple liquefaction of ice ([§ 48]); and the melting of icebergs is on this account so slow, that when large they sometimes maintain themselves till they have been drifted 2000 miles from their place of birth.
345. What is their origin? The Arctic glaciers. From the mountains in the interior the indurated snows slide into the valleys and fill them with ice. The glaciers thus formed move like the Swiss ones, incessantly downward. But the Arctic glaciers reach the sea, enter it, often ploughing up its bottom into submarine moraines. Undermined by the lapping of the waves, and unable to resist the strain imposed by their own weight, they break across, and discharge vast masses into the ocean. Some of these run aground on the adjacent shores, and often maintain themselves for years. Others escape southward, to be finally dissolved in the warm waters of the Atlantic. The first engraving on the opposite page is copied from a photograph taken by Mr. Bradford during a recent expedition to the Northern seas. The second represents a mass of ice upon the Glacier des Bossons. Their likeness suggests their common origin.