Edwin Swift Balch

“ The entrance of the glacière was surrounded by woods, which formed a natural rampart to anything like wind. As we stood facing the glacière a great pit opened before us, with a slope about one hundred and thirty-five meters long leading to the bottom. This slope is at first gentle in its gradient, but lower down it steepens to an angle of some thirty degrees so that we were glad to resort to the trail which descends in regular Alpine zigzags. ”

“ At the bottom we stood in a magnificent gallery named the Korridor, formed by a solid wall of ice on one side and by a wall of limestone rock on the other. The ice wall is the lower portion of the ice floor; the rock wall is the continuation of the roof. For the entire distance the ice wall rises almost perpendicularly some fifteen meters in height, while the rock wall arches overhead. ”

“ I thought of those old voluptuaries, who cooled their wine with snow, and it seemed to me, as though they might have had it much cheaper if in their time there had been many such Froidieres, to refresh it with ice, instead of with snow, as some of the gentlemen of the neighborhood of the Froidiere and some of the most notable persons of the neighborhood of Bezenson do; who by night, have a good supply brought on horses, which they keep in their caves, and use at their meals and banquets. ”

“ I have already said that I believe that the cold of winter is the cause of the ice in caves. To make this clearer, I may say that I look on glacières as the last outcrop, the outside edge, so to speak, of the area of low temperatures, which has its culminating point in the Northern Hemisphere in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland and Siberia, and in the Southern Hemisphere in the Antarctic; and which is manifested to us in the snows of mountain peaks, and immediately round us in frozen ponds and rivers and snowy blizzards ”

“ Besides the chance that a visitor has of receiving on his head one of those magnificent stalactites 1 meter or 2 meters long which fall continually from the roof, it is perfectly disagreeable to him to arrive at the base of the slope otherwise than on the sole of his boots, and to face thus the frequent and painful meeting with rocks whose angular edges dot the surface of the descent, smooth as a mirror set at an angle of 30°. ”

“ That the cold of winter is the source of the cold which produces the ice which forms underground, and that it is through its influence, with the assistance of certain secondary causes, that some caves are converted into what are practically natural ice houses, seems to me the true explanation of the phenomenon of subterranean ice, not only since it is the simple and obvious explanation, but also because all the facts, so far as I have myself observed, are in accord with this theory. ”

“ This process is the exact opposite of the formation of ice by evaporation; it is the atmosphere which is made humid by the vaporizing of the ice, and by the drip. When the air is thoroughly saturated with the vapor, being scarcely renewed from outside and but a few degrees above freezing point, it undoubtedly retards evaporation, acts like a blanket and lessens the rate of melting of the ice. ”

“ The air in the cave seemed absolutely still throughout; it was also extremely dry, undoubtedly because melting had not yet begun. The icicles evidently were formed by the slow drip freezing as it descended, and there were no perceptible cracks nor fissures in the rocks underneath them. The facts seem to me to prove that neither evaporation nor regelation can be the factors at work in making the ice and we may deduce an important rule therefrom. When a cave is dry, then the air is dry; when a cave is wet, then the atmosphere is damp. ”

“ He told me that once, while in the cavern, he heard distant yells, and, going up the gallery whence they proceeded, found a man half dead, who said he had tried to come through the mountain by himself, had broken his lantern and had remained in the darkness an indefinite number of hours; a situation, the horror of which could not be realized by anyone who has not been underground without a light and felt the absolute blackness of a cavern. ”

“ He made a plan of the cave and took many observations in April, August and October, and concluded that the interior condition of the cave does not change noticeably from winter to summer, no matter what the external conditions of temperature may be; that what people say of greater cold in summer, vanishes before actual experience and that, as a state of freezing reigns more or less continuously in the cave, it is not surprising if the ice accumulates. Apparently he was the first to notice and insist on the necessity of drainage to the cave through cracks in the rocks. ”

“ The presence or absence of strong, apparent draughts, cannot be considered as a test as to whether a place is or is not a glacière; the presence of ice, for at least part of the year, alone makes a glacière, and this it does whether « 62 » there are or are not draughts. It seems to me more than ever clear, however, that it all depends on the movements of air, as to whether ice forms in a cave. If the movements of air take the cold air of winter into a cave, then and then only—provided there is also a water supply—do we have ice. ”

“ 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 ice once formed in such cavities, only melts slowly; for one knows that ice in melting, absorbs 60° of heat; and where find this heat in an air always very cold and nearly still? During a great cold, the ice forms with great promptness, while it melts with much slowness, even when the temperature of the air is several degrees above zero; what must then not be this slowness when the temperature of the interior air only rises in summer one degree above freezing point. It would need several summers to melt this ice if it did not reform each winter. ”

“ THE EISHÖHLE BEI ROTH.
The Eifel is one of the bleakest districts of Central Europe, and to one entering it from the vineyards and the well-inhabited basin of the Rhine, the contrast is impressive. The railroad rises gradually to a land of comparatively desert appearance, with rocks and trees on the heights and a sparse cultivation in the valleys. But, if the country is unattractive to the agriculturist, it is interesting to the geologist, on account of the great number of extinct volcanoes. ”

“ The memoir states that in winter the cave is filled with thick vapors and that after some trees were cut down near the entrance, the ice was less abundant than formerly: that people come for ice with carts and mules, but that the ice does not become exhausted, for one day of great heat forms more ice than could be carried away in eight days in carts and wagons: and that when a fog forms in the cave, there is assuredly rain the following day, and that the peasants in the neighborhood consult this curious “almanac” to know the weather which is coming. ”

“ The Friedrichsteiner Eishöhle is a large pit cave, well lighted by daylight. It is sheltered from any winds by the great trees which grow all around it and even over the rock roof. A long, steep slope leads straight into the pit and from the top the ice floor is in full sight. On both sides of the slope the rocks are almost sheer. Over the bottom of the slope the rock roof projects at a great height. The sides of the cave rise perpendicularly at least forty meters, and in fact, the cave suggests an unfinished tunnel set on end. ”

“ If there are no crevasses, there are holes and runnels. These are generally found at or leading to the lowest point of the ice floor. Occasionally the holes are deep, sometimes many meters in depth. They are certainly cut out by the melting water, to which they offer an exit; in fact they are a part of the drainage system present in all glacière caves, where there must be some outlet for surplus water at or near the lowest point: and as the caves are always in porous or broken rock, the drainage takes place through the cracks and fissures. ”

“ One knows that the outside waters above form on the roof, during the winter, long drops and stalactites of ice. These icicles, which hang down and increase constantly by the drip from the same source which formed them, fall at last, carried away by their own weight, and form so many centres, around which freeze the waters with which the floor of the grotto is always inundated. At the same time, the blowing of the north wind accumulates snow at the base of the slope, which is uncovered in part and exposed above to all the « 274 » vicissitudes of the weather. ”

“ One must guard against most trying changes of temperature. For, on entering a big glacière, the heat of a July day without, will, at a distance of only a few meters, give place to the cold of a January day within, and nothing could be better devised than a big glacière to lay the seeds of rheumatism. ”

“ At the Schafloch or the Frauenmauer, on the contrary, the effect is wholly subterranean: daylight is so completely absent that black is the predominating note, the ice itself looking gray. Dóbsina is an exception, as, thanks to the electric light, white is the conspicuous tone, even though rocks and shadows dull many places and corners into a sombre gray.
More than once, on returning to daylight from the intense blackness of a cave, I have seen the rocks near the entrance appear a dark blue color, exactly simulating moonlight. This effect is common to both glacière caves and ordinary caverns. ”

“ In many mountain ravines or canyons, the enduring snow consists principally of the avalanches which have fallen from the heights above during the winter and solidified in the bottom of the ravines. Freezing gorges proper, however, are not dependent on avalanches for their supply, but they receive the accretions to their ice directly from the winter snows. These fall into the gorge itself and by melting and regelation gradually solidify into a mass of ice which, when well sheltered against sun and wind, remains over sometimes till the following winter. ”

“ During the winter, the snow fills the shaft half full of ice, which then remains over through the summer. There is a general report and belief among those who have visited the well, that it freezes in summer and thaws in winter. There are thousands of mining shafts in Montana, and if they are on the north slope of a mountain of considerable altitude and under a dense forest and not too deep, they generally have ice at the bottom during the summer. ”

“ Pit caves are those where a pit or pits open into the ground, and the ice is found at the bottom. Sometimes there is no roof, when the place may be called a gorge: this occurs at Ellenville, where the roof has fallen. Again, the pit itself is more or less roofed over and the ice is found mainly or wholly under the roof: this is the case at Haut d’Aviernoz, at the Friedrichsteinerhöhle, at Saint-Livres, and at Saint-Georges. Sometimes the pit takes the form of a descending tunnel, leading into a hall or chamber, in which the ice lies under a rock roof: this happens at Chaux-les-Passavant. ”

“ Freezing boulder taluses invariably have the ice near the surface, and probably it is never a dozen meters distant from the open air. These taluses are one of the strongest links in the chain of evidence proving the winter’s cold theory. The snow and ice on the surface of the taluses and on the surface of the boulders in gullies melts away, while it still lingers underneath the boulders. ”

“ Behind the upper wave, five or six fissure columns streamed out to the beginning of the ice. One ice stalactite, at least two or three meters long, overhung the ice floor, and Gruber said about this: “Well, I wonder it has not fallen yet: they seldom last as late in the year,” a confirmation of what was clearly evident, namely, that the whole cave was in a state of thaw. ”

“ The winter following has therefore even more facility to augment the mass of these ice pyramids, which have resisted until the fall. And if men did not work at diminishing it, it might happen that it would fill the entire cavern at last to a great height.
“I am therefore strongly inclined to think that the process of nature is here precisely similar to that of art; that without any especial cause of cold, the natural glacière of Besançon conserves in the moderate temperature of deep caverns, the heaps of snow and ice which the winds and the outside waters accumulate there during the winter ”

“ The little glacière is formed by a number of fissures in the rock, disconnected slits in the surface opening into larger chambers where the ice lies. The neigière is a deep pit, with a collection of snow at the bottom, much sheltered by overhanging rocks and trees. A huge fallen rock covers a large part of the sloping bottom of the pit, which forms a small cave in the shape of a round soldier’s tent, with walls of rock and floor of ice. ”