Drift (snow)

“ A moment more and the room vanished in utter blackness of night, the roar grew grander and deeper, until it throbbed in his ears like the diapason of a mighty organ, a fierce blast of snow-laden wind struck his bewildered face, the street-lamp upon the corner flickered feebly in a mist of flakes—he was standing before his own door, knee-deep in a snow-drift, and buffeted above, below, and on every side by the storm that was abroad that Christmas Eve. ”

“ None of the crew would accompany me: my mess-mates did not volunteer: so I was alone.
“It was a walk to be remembered. Snow up to the neck; drift moist and blinding; and a gale, luckily not a cold one, in my face. But after a mile of such promenading as no other region can boast of, I reached the water at last. Water it was; dark, surging water; no pellicles of glazing ice; no sludgy streams of pancake; but the liquid element itself, such as we saw last summer, and you see every day, stretching out as broad as the Delaware, and in contrast with the snow at its margin as black as Styx. ”

“ The clouds broke and vanished, not a crystal was left in the sky, and the stars shone out with pure and tranquil radiance.
During the storm we lay on our backs so as to present as little surface as possible to the wind, and to let the drift pass over us. The mealy snow sifted into the folds of our clothing and in many places reached the skin. We were glad at first to see the snow packing about us, hoping it would deaden the force of the wind, but it soon froze into a stiff, crusty heap as the temperature fell, rather augmenting our novel misery. ”

“ Thick drift and a fifty-mile wind on January 12 kept us confined for thirty-six hours. It was clear enough after noon on the 13th, and five miles were covered in four hours through thick surface drift. What the course was we did not care as we steered by the sastrugi. If ever a man had any "homing instinct" it would surely show itself on such an occasion as this.
Travelling in driving snow used to have a curious effect on me. I always imagined that we were just coming to an avenue of trees running at right angles to our course. ”

“ We were crossing a drift which had apparently not been broken into since it had first been piled up the previous week. Such drifts are dangerous because they will bear up for a while under the horses’ weight, and then the hard pressed crust will break and reveal a softer core inside. Just that happened here, and exactly at a moment, too, when the drifting snow caught me with its full force and at its full height. It was a quarter-minute of stumbling, jumping, pulling one against the other—and then a rally, and we emerged in front of a farmyard from which a fairly fresh trail led south. ”

“ Drift-ice is always attracted to the lee side of a heavy floe, where it bumps and presses under the influence of the current. I had determined not to risk a repetition of the last night’s experience and so had not pulled the boats up. We spent the hours of darkness keeping an offing from the main line of pack under the lee of the smaller pieces. Constant rain and snow squalls blotted out the stars and soaked us through, and at times it was only by shouting to each other that we managed to keep the boats together. ”

“ The effect of constant abrasion upon the snow's surface is to harden it, and, finally, to carve ridges known as sastrugi. Of these much will be said when recounting our sledging adventures, because they increase so much the difficulties of travelling.
Even hard, blue ice may become channelled and pitted by the action of drift. Again, both neve and ice may receive a wind-polish which makes them very slippery. ”

“ Generally when you go out into a blizzard the drift is blown from your face and clothes, and though you cannot see your stretched-out hand, especially on a dark winter day, the wind prevents you being smothered. The wind also prevents the land, tents, hut and cases from being covered. But during this blizzard the drift drove at you in such blankets of snow, that your person was immediately blotted out, your face covered and your eyes plugged up. ”

“ The immense quantity of snow which in a gale is kept suspended in the air by the action of the wind, and is termed drift, quite astounded us; and on two occasions, with north-westerly gales, we had a good opportunity of noting its accumulation. The "Pioneer" and "Intrepid" laying across the wind, the counter-current caused a larger deposition around us than elsewhere. ”

“ The Rescue is driven out to sea, and poor Penny is probably to the southward. Five black masses, however, their cordage defined by rime and snow, are seen with their snouts shoved into the shore of ice: cables, chains, « 76 » and anchors are covered feet below the drift, and the ships adhere mysteriously, their tackle completely invisible. Should any of us break away, the gale would carry us into streams of heavy floating ice; and our running rigging is so coated with icicles as to make it impossible to work it. The thermometer stands at 14°. ”

“ The first few miles gave a gradual rise of one hundred feet per mile, so that, with a heavy load against wind and drift, travelling was very slow. The wind now dropped to almost calm, and the drift cleared. In the afternoon progress was hampered by crevasses, which were very frequent, running east and west and from one to twenty feet in width. The wider ones were covered with firm snow-bridges; the snow in places having formed into granular and even solid ice. ”

“ Should they chance to become well covered with snow in winter, then, when warmth returns and the snow gradually melts away, plants quickly spring up, and the heaps become fixed and cease to drift. It is obvious that not infrequently land shells, and often enough the remains of mammals, must be entombed in such wind-blown materials.
In winter, however, it is snow more commonly than dust that drifts before the wind. The great snowstorms of the subarctic steppes are quite as terrible as those of the tundras. No life can withstand the fury of the blizzards, and many are the disasters on record. ”

“ The slow emergence of the tops of these fence posts became during the following week, when I drove out here daily, a measure for me of the settling down of the drift. I believe I can say from my observations that if no new snow falls or drifts in, and if no very considerable evaporation takes place, a newly piled snowdrift, undisturbed except by wind-pressure, will finally settle down to about from one third to one half of its original height, according to the pressure of the wind that was behind the snow when it first was thrown down. ”

“ An air insect would be, in this dreary waste of cold, an impossibility greater than the diamond in the snow-drift. Save a seal and a fox, nothing sharing our principle of vitality has greeted us for months. The teeming myriads of life which characterized the Arctic summer have gone. The anatidæ are clamoring in the great bays and water-courses of the middle south. The gulls have sought the regions of open water. ”

“ The wind roared over the snow floes, and every thing about the vessel froze into heavy ice stalactites. Had the main floe parted, we had been carried down with the liberated ice. Fortunately, every thing held; and here we are, safe and sound. The Rescue was last seen beating to windward against the gale, probably seeking a lee under Griffith’s Island. This morning the snow continues in the form of a fine cutting drift, the water freezes wherever it touches, and the thermometer has been at no time above 17°.
“September 12, 10 P.M. Just from deck. How very dismal every thing seems! ”

“ If a snow-drift is upon a thirty-degree incline, it may almost be pushed into sliding with a feather. A slope more steeply inclined than thirty degrees does not offer a snow-drift any visible means of support. Unless this slope be broken or rough, a snow-drift may slide off at any moment.
In the course of a winter, as many as half a dozen slides may start from the same place and [Pg 82] each shoot down through the same gorge or over the same slope as its predecessor. Only so much snow can cling to a slope ”

“ This heavy snow-drift exceeds any thing that I had conceived, although many of my Arctic English friends had discoursed to me eloquently about their perils and discomforts. As to facing it in a stationary position, nothing human could; for a man would be buried in ten minutes. Even in reaching our little Tusculum, we tumble up to our middle, in places where a few minutes before the very ice was laid bare. The entire topography of our ice is changing constantly.
“7 P.M. ‘The wind is howling.’ Our mess begin to talk again of sleeping in boots, and the other luxuries of Lancaster Sound. ”

“ Jim Smith, little Jim Smith, reported ‘Land.’ We have become so accustomed to this great sameness of snow, that it was hard to realize at first « 332 » the magnitude of our drift. Our last land was the spectral elevation upreared in the sunset sky of the 9th of February. The land itself must have been eighty miles off. Our drift, although now not absolutely fixed by observation, has probably carried us to within forty miles, perhaps thirty, of Cape Searle. Land it certainly is, shadowy, high, snow-covered, and strange. ”

“ The wind to-day made it intensely cold. In riding but four miles to inspect a fox-trap, the movement froze my cheeks twice. We avoid masks with great care, reserving them for the severer weather; the jaw when protected recovers very soon the sensibility which exposure has subdued.
“March 31.—I was within an ace to-day of losing my clogs, every one of them. When I reached the ice-foot, they balked;—who would not?—the tide was low, the ice rampant, and a jump of four feet necessary to reach the crest. The howling of the wind and the whirl of the snow-drift confused the poor creatures ”

“ The motion of ice, influenced by winds, tides, and currents, keeps constantly abrading the shore-line. Any outward drift, of course, makes an irregular lane of water, which a single night converts into ice; the returning floes heap this in tables one over another; and the next outward set carries off the floes again, crowned with their new increment.
« 133 »
“The haze gathered around us about an hour after starting, and the hummocks were so covered with snow that the chasms often received us middle deep. We walked five hours and a half, making in all but eleven miles ”

“ The eternal silence of the great white desert. Cloudy columns of snow drift advancing from the south, pale yellow wraiths, heralding the coming storm, blotting out one by one the sharp-cut lines of the land. ”

“ The plain sinks towards the sea nearly everywhere with a steep escarpment, three to fifteen metres high, below which there is formed during the course of the winter an immense snowdrift or so-called "snow-foot," which does not melt until late in the season. ”

“ The winding streams of them were very like the spindrift I have seen swept in tortuous, level flight from the black waves of the mid-Atlantic by a wild sea gale. Very white they looked as they flew along the black ice, yet when I picked a handful of them from the pond margin I saw that they were anything but white. Instead they were dirty, in places fairly black. The air had seemed crystal clear for weeks, yet the snow had found in it the soot of a thousand factory chimneys and brought it to earth.
The air seems full of a magical new life always after it has been snowing for an hour or two. ”

“ The gale had hardly been blowing for ten or fifteen minutes, when the snow began to whirl down. It came in the tiniest possible flakes, consisting this time of short needles that looked like miniature spindles, strung with the smallest imaginable globules of ice—no six-armed crystals that I could find so far. Many a snowstorm begins that way with us. And there was even here, in the chasm of the road, a swing and dance to the flakes that bespoke the force of the wind above. ”

“ October 25.—In the afternoon we made an attempt to drive the dog sledges, but the snow, in spite of the low temperature, lay in such masses between the small hummocks and on the few level places, that they sank deep into it. It is storms of wind only that harden the snow, and for some time we have had calms or light breezes. In the evening there was a movement in the ice astern of the ship, accompanied with the highest soprano tones. The noise the ice makes in its pressure very much resembles the piping and howling of a storm among rocky cliffs or through the rigging of a ship. ”

“ We never tire of standing on the deck watching the drift-ice, which has a charm for any one who is observing it for the first time, even as it has for “old hands” in the northern regions. Against the sides of the great icebergs waves are breaking, just as they do against the island reefs of the Norwegian coast. The drifting pieces of ice have ever-changing forms. During a thaw, sea, sun, and wind turn them into shapes more weird and fantastic than even a sculptor could do. ”

“ They gravely bade farewell to all, and the little crowd cheered lustily against the whine of the blizzard as, with cracking whip and hoarse shouts, they were wrapped in the cloudy winding sheet of snow.
Arctic storms have an even sameness; the intense cold, the heartless wind which augments tenfold the chill of the temperature, the air thick and dark with stinging flakes rushing by in an endless cloud. A drifting, freezing, shifting eternity of snow, driven by a ravening gale which sweeps the desolate, bald wastes of the Northland. ”