Mer de Glace

“ I was tempted, by the thought of becoming acquainted with the beauties and dangers of the Mer de Glace, and determined to undertake the hazardous journey; but how I repented of doing so, when, in its midst, I discovered what the nature of it was! For one did not merely run the continual danger of slipping and falling whilst climbing over the icy billows, but one found one's self perpetually on the brink of wide crevices in the ice-mass, of two or three hundred feet deep, and across which one must leap, without any other foot-hold than a smooth icy-wave or hillock. ”

“ Our course led us over the old Mer de Glace, the glacier made famous by De Saussure and Forbes. The heat of the day was over, but the little rills and rivulets were still flowing along the surface of the ice; cutting deep troughs where the gradients were small, leaving ripple-marks where the water was with more difficulty confined to one channel, and falling over the precipitous walls of the great crevasses, sometimes in bounding cascades, and sometimes in diffused streams, which marked the perpendicular faces with graceful sinuosities. ”

“ You will do well to recollect, that nature works in other ways in the high north than in the high Cordilleras and Alps, and especially in the latter, where she carefully slides her mer-de-glace into the warm valley, and gently melts it off, letting it run merrily and freely to the sea, every crystal fetter broken into silvery foam. But in Greenland she heaves her mile-wide glacier, in all its flinty hardness, into the great deep bodily, and sends it, both a glory and a terror, to flourish or perish as the currents of the solemn main move it to wintry or to summer climes. ”

“ The mer de glace is of great extent, and, rising much more rapidly and being more broken, gives a picturesque effect not belonging to the Greenland side, and adds much to the grandeur of its appearance. The mountains are lofty, and are everywhere uniformly covered with ice and snow; and the glacier streams which descend to the sea convey the impression almost as if there had once been a vast lake on the mountain-top, from which the overflowing waters, pouring down every valley, had been suddenly congealed. ”

“ Those who have not seen it can form but a faint conception of the stupendous mass of débris which is cut, torn, wrenched, carried, swept, hurled, rolled, crushed, and ground down by a glacier from the mountain-heights into the plain below. The terminal moraine of the Mer de Glace is a whole valley whose floor and sides are not only quite, but deeply, covered with rocks of every shape and size, from a pebble the size of a pea, to a boulder as large as a cottage, all strewn, piled, and heaped together in a wild confusion that is eminently suggestive of the mighty force which cast them there. ”

“ Leaving the river-bed just above the lake, they climbed to the summit of this hillock; and there a sight burst upon them, grand and imposing beyond the power of words adequately to describe. From the rocky bed, only a few miles in advance, a sloping wall of pure whiteness rose to a broad level plain of ice, which, apparently without limits, stretched away toward the unknown east. It was the great mer de glace of the Arctic continent. ”

“ This ascent was upon the glacier, at an angle, when I first set out, of about six degrees with the horizon; but afterwards, upon the mer de glace, it was by a scarcely perceptible acclivity. Unhappily I was set upon by a tempest. The temperature sank to thirty-four degrees below zero, having steadily fallen to that point as I climbed higher and higher in the air. Nothing could possibly be more terrible than a wind under such conditions, except, perhaps, a furnace-blast. Mercury hardened almost to the consistency of lead. The moisture of the breath froze on the beard in solid lumps of ice. ”

“ THE MER DE GLACE. These glaciers have their foundation in the wonderful Mer de Glace, or Sea of Ice; shooting up from it their sharp peaks into the frozen air. “To get the best view of it as a whole,” says a modern Alpine tourist, “you cross the meadows in the vale of Chamouny, step over the furious Arve, and climb 52the mountain precipices to the hight of two thousand feet, by a rough, craggy path, sometimes winding amidst a wood of firs, and sometimes wandering over green grasses. ”

“ No one who has not climbed the glacier—even the Mer de Glace to the Jardin, now such a common excursion—can fail to be struck with the beauty and grandeur of the scene presented to him, and to carry away a fond recollection of the icy regions he penetrated. ”

“ To get the ice, these mighty frozen seas are excavated in galleries and chambers, and magnificent saloons. The depths of snow on the surface exclude the sunbeams, but calcium lights shed a brilliant lustre, reflected as from a thousand mirrors of glass, and in small apartments fitted up for the purpose, the furniture of a well appointed parlor, sofas, chairs, and cushions, invite to cold but not inhospitable repose. When the Mer de Glace is taken by rail down into Italy, and thence by ship to the East Indies, ice will be reasonably cheap in Calcutta. ”

“ The care-laden commercial lives we lead close our eyes to the operations of God as a workman, though openly carried on that all who will look may see. The scarred rocks here and the moraines make a vivid showing of the old winter-time of the glacial period, and mark the bounds of the mer-de-glace that once filled the bay and covered the surrounding mountains. ”

“ This line of cliff rises, like a solid wall of glass, three hundred feet above the water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below it; and its curved face, sixty miles in length, disappears into unknown space at not more than a single day’s railroad-travel from the Pole. The [132] interior with which it communicates, and from which it issues, is an unexplored mer de glace, an ice-ocean, of apparently boundless dimensions. ”

“ The transition from one to the other of these various conditions was gradual and orderly: first, a nearly simple tableland; then a grand mer de glace shedding its crawling silver currents to the sea, and becoming gradually more wrinkled as unequal erosion roughened its bed, and brought the highest peaks and ridges above the surface; then a land of lakes, an almost continuous sheet of water stretching from the Sierra to the Wahsatch, adorned with innumerable island mountains ”

“ LIQUID MOTION ASCRIBED TO GLACIER.
"But this is not all," adds M. Rendu: "Between the Mer de Glace and a river, there is a resemblance so complete that it is impossible to find in the latter a circumstance which does not exist in the former. In currents of water the motion is not uniform, neither throughout their width nor throughout their depth; the friction of the bottom, that of the sides, the action of obstacles, cause the motion to vary, and only towards the middle of the surface is this entire...." ”

“ All the Greenland glaciers become confluent in the interior, so that it is not a typical mer de glace, but a sheet of ice, which overspreads the highest mountains. It is only near the edge that the several streams manifest their independent existence. Thence the usual phenomena of Alpine glaciers manifest themselves. The sub-glacial streams pouring into the sea produce certain peculiarities. Immense supplies of heat penetrate the ice from the sun's rays, which melt very much ice and discharge muddy torrents of great size. ”

“ Where the glacial markings have been most studiously investigated, it appears that an ice-sheet invariably occupies a definite area; that a mer de glace accumulates in the higher central portions, from which glaciers move outwardly in all directions, extending as far as the descending ground will permit, or the oceanic currents can convey the icebergs broken off from the frozen mass without melting ”

“ The enormous morainic accumulations formed underneath and in front of the alpine glaciers, and over the vast areas traversed by the Scandinavian mer de glace, bear emphatic testimony to the intensity of glacial erosion. In like manner the great terraces of gravel that stretch down the valleys in front of the alpine moraines and the broad sheets of similar deposits which extend outward from the glaciated tracts of northern Europe, are equally impressive witnesses to the vigor of the flooded glacial rivers. ”

“ What is the duty of a traveller and his guides overtaken on the mountains by bad weather is a question which the sad death on the Mer de Glace brought not long ago prominently before the public, and which will be argued as often as some fatal accident calls attention to the subject. ”

“ But there is no danger involved of anything worse than sitting down hard. The continuous procession of tourists passing over makes losing one’s way quite out of the question, and the function of the guide is only to lend a steadying hand to the aged and infirm or to persons unsuitably dressed for scrambling. There is nothing at all about the Mer de Glace to justify its reputation. It is simply an average characteristic sort of glacier, very accessible to the general tourist, and safe and easy to walk across. ”

“ Vast as they are to the sight, and dwarfs as they are compared with the inland mer de glace, yet they are, in all that concerns their growth, truly glaciers—pigmy floating glaciers. That they can only grow to such great depth in this manner will be at once apparent, when it is borne in mind that ice soon reaches a maximum thickness by direct freezing, and that its growth is arrested by a natural law. ”

“ These glaciers—ice-rivers—we will now consider briefly. We may take the Mer de Glace as an example [Pg 607] (see the illustration, p. 596) . That gives us a very fair idea of the ice-river, but the cut below is a good specimen of a glacier.
Suppose we start up from Chamouni, or come across from Argentières, we shall reach the Montanvert by ascending through the wood, or by the “Chapeau,” across the ice-sea. As we take the former course, we walk alongside a white-flowing and rapid river, the Arve, which unites with the Rhone below Geneva. ”

“ If moraines were built from matter excavated by glaciers, the moraines of Greenland should be the greatest in the world!
The absence of moraines upon and at the termination of this great Mer de Glace is due to the want of rocks rising above the ice. [31] On two occasions in 1867 I saw, at a glance, at least six hundred square miles of it from the summits of small mountains on its outskirts. Not a single peak or ridge was to be seen rising above, nor a single rock reposing upon, the ice. The country was completely covered up by glacier: all was ice as far as the eye could see. ”

“ We need not be surprised that interglacial beds should be well developed underneath the bottom-moraine of that great glacier, while they have not yet been recognised below the corresponding morainic accumulations of our Highlands and Uplands. The conditions in the low-grounds of the Baltic coast-lands favoured their preservation, for the ice in those regions formed a broad mer de glace, under the peripheral areas of which sub-glacial erosion was necessarily at a minimum and the accumulation at a maximum. In our Scottish mountain-valleys, however, the very opposite was the case. ”

“ The terminal moraines of these glaciers have been mapped out, and the general conditions of the epoch have been so well ascertained that the position of the snow line at the time has been determined. It is believed to have been upon an average some 4,000 feet lower than now. While the valleys of the Alps were thus gorged with ice and the basin of the Baltic was occupied by an immense mer de glace, it is not probable that the higher parts of our islands could have escaped glaciation. We can hardly doubt that snow fields and glaciers must also have existed here. ”

“ I can then help myself. Miss Gray, shall I assist you to a—no? Well, as I was about to remark, in reply to your comprehensive question, Mademoiselle, this basin, in which our Jardin lies, may be styled a mighty collector of the material which forms that great tributary of the Mer de Glace, named the Glacier du Talèfre. This material is called névé.”
“An’ what’s nevy?” asked Captain Wopper, as well as a full mouth would allow him.
“Névé,” replied the Professor, “is snow altered by partial melting, and freezing, and compression—snow in the process of being squeezed into ice. ”

“ Sometimes the upper clay rests directly upon the lower; at other times they are separated by alluvial and peaty accumulations or by marine deposits. The wider distribution of the lower till, the direction of transport of its included erratics, and the trend of the underlying roches moutonnées and rock-striæ, clearly show that the earlier mer de glace covered a wider area than its successor, and was confluent on the floor of the North Sea with the Scandinavian ice-sheet. It was during the formation of the lower till, in short, that glaciation in these islands attained its maximum development. ”

“ When a glacier diminishes in size it leaves its lateral moraines stranded on the flanks of the valleys. Successive shrinkings may thus occur, and have occurred at intervals of centuries; and a succession of old lateral moraines, such as many glacier-valleys exhibit, is the consequence. The Mer de Glace, for example, has its old lateral moraines, which run parallel with its present ones. ”

“ I am very glad to meet you, Michel. I have known your name a long while and envied you for living in the days when these mountains were unknown."
Revailloud forgot the mules to the Montanvert and the tourists on the Mer de Glace. He warmed into cheerfulness. This young girl looked at him with so frank an envy.
"Yes, those were great days, mademoiselle," he said, with a thrill of pride in his voice. "But if we love the mountains, the first ascent or the hundredth—there is just the same joy when you feel the rough rock beneath your fingers or the snow crisp under your feet. ”