The hundreds of thousands of icebergs that every spring and
summer terrify our ocean steamers are simply detachments from
the glaciers that perpetually cover the face of northern lands.
As far as can be learned, the interior of Greenland has a
surface of tall hills and deep gulches, with an elevated range
rather on the eastern side, running from north to south. Hence,
if the climate of the interior of Greenland were mild, this
extended range would serve as a watershed diverting streams to
the sea on both sides. But the temperature some distance inland
is nearly always below the freezing point, so that the almost
constant snowfall and the brief midsummer rains remain on the
surface, accumulating year after year, till there are formed
thousands of square miles of blue compact ice, some of it over
1,500 feet thick. This enormous body of ice, like water, is
subject to the laws of gravitation, and is eternally on the
march to the sea. But its rate of travel is so slow as to be
in most places imperceptible to the eye. So deep is this mass
of inland ice that after a couple of days’ march from the sea
there are no longer any hills visible, the entire landscape
being white and naked. The ice from the higher ground is being
constantly forced into the valleys and most of these valleys
terminate toward the sea in very deep fjords. These fjords
are in reality the launchways for most of the ice-floes and a
great many of the bergs. You might lie for hours in your boat
by most of the glaciers where they enter the sea, and not be
aware that they were moving; but each one pushes constantly,
and at a regular rate of speed, outward and outward into the
sea, till the buoyancy of the water under it causes it to break
at the shore, and sets it free to rove the ocean for thousands
of miles, till it melts in Southern latitudes.--EDMUND
COLLINS, _Harper’s Weekly_.
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