Ice hummock

“ Several days after this order of things had been established, the mate took half a dozen of us younger fellows out for a long tramp over the ice. There were three guns in the party, and we went along like a parcel of schoolboys out on a frolic.
“We made only about eight miles before noon, for the ice was so uneven that the traveling was rougher than any I had ever experienced, when suddenly, upon rounding an enormous ice hummock, we came in sight of a group of Esquimaux, sledges and dogs, and were discovered before we could retreat behind the hummock again. ”

“ I took a stroll over the ice [518] among the lanes and hummocks. It was so wonderfully calm and still. Not a sound to be heard but the drip, drip of water from a block of ice, and the dull sound of a snow-slip from some hummock in the distance. The sun is low down in the north, and overhead is the pale blue dome of heaven, with gold-edged clouds. The profound peace of the Arctic solitudes. My thoughts fly free and far. If one could only give utterance to all that stirs one’s soul on such an evening as this! What an incomprehensible power one’s surroundings have over one! ”

“ However, with such stoves in the South one would never lack cooked food or warm hut.
Discussed with Wright the fact that the hummocks on sea ice always yield fresh water. We agreed that the brine must simply run down out of the ice. It will be interesting to bring up a piece of sea ice and watch this process. But the fact itself is interesting as showing that the process producing the hummock is really producing fresh water. It may also be noted as a phenomenon which makes all the difference to the ice navigator.5
Truly the getting to our winter quarters is no light task ”

“ When night was well advanced the Indian found himself on the ice of the open sea with nothing but hummocks and bergs to shelter him. Being acquainted, by hearsay at least, with some of the methods of the Eskimos, he avoided the bergs, for there was the danger of masses falling from their sides and from overhanging ice-cliffs, and selected a small hummock—a heap of masses that had been thrown or crushed up earlier in the winter, covered with snow, and formed into a solid mound. ”

“ On smooth ice and hard snow any method of harnessing could be used; but, on rough ice, by any other method every cross piece would quickly break on attempting to cross the hummocks. Frequently the traces catch a projecting point and the dogs are then pulled back and thrown against the ice or under the sledge if the trace does not break. If for any reason a dog should hang back and the trace should trail over the snow the driver must lift it up to prevent it from being caught by the sledge runner, else the dog will be dragged in the same way as if the trace were caught by a hummock. ”

“ To the west the water sparkled in the sunlight, but no land and no life, human or otherwise, was within the range of vision.
After a time they returned to their bivouac and then drove the dogs a little farther into the ice pack to a high hummock that Aluktook had found, and with an axe and snow knives cut blocks of ice from the hummock and snow from a drift on its lee side, and finally had a fairly substantial igloo built. This they made as comfortable as possible, and settled in it as the last shelter they should ever have in the world, as they all firmly believed it would prove. ”

“ Ponds of water are covered with a glare and safe coat of ice, and our youngsters get out their skates, so carefully laid away last season. The children trudge away to school, and their color is heightened by the morning frost and wind; but gradually the human system is getting accustomed to the change of the season, and the dry, pleasant cold is enjoyable. Immense ice hummocks form upon the banks of our large lakes. They are conical and steep, or blunt and rolling, with a flat place here and there among the convolutions. ”

“ It was a beautiful Arctic day when I came on deck before breakfast. Ahead of us, the world was white, not a break to be seen anywhere, astern some open water. The Cornwallis was lying on our port side a few hundred yards away, so that about eleven I went on board, and, with Armitage, started off to look for something to shoot, among the hummocks, three or four miles north of where we lay. We spent hours tramping over the ice, but did not see a track, so we returned to our ships about six P. M. This hummock belt extended east and west and had been caused by the rafting of great floes. ”

“ Frequent snow squalls from the north and west added annoyance. At noon it began to lighten and when we reached Henson’s igloo, the wind 124had ceased and the sun was trying to shine. Some season’s ice and two narrow leads of recent ice were crossed in this march. The rest of the way we had heavy old floes, some of them the blue hummock kind, on which the going was good, interrupted by old ruptures and belts of rubble ice over which the going was very bad. These places served as nets to catch all the snow blown off the level places, and there it lay soft and deep. ”

“ In middle New England the ground-moraine is developed into the lenticular hill—an oblong rounded hummock, sometimes two hundred feet high, mostly composed of lower till, with a trend corresponding to the direction of the ice-current in the neighborhood, varying from nearly southeast near Newburyport to south 10° west in the Connecticut Valley. ”

“ Sometimes they anchored their vessels to icebergs, and sometimes to floes or masses of hummock. On one of these occasions, while the cook, an active Frenchman, was upon a berg, making a place for an anchor, the mass of ice split beneath him, and he was dropped through the yawning fissure into the water, a distance of almost thirty feet. Fortunately the masses, as is often the case, did not close up again, but floated apart, and the poor cook was hauled on board more dead than alive, from excessive fright. ”

“ The geese proved to be fat and a great delicacy.
We then dropped to our former level and speed, and resumed the lookout for land. Ice floes were still occasionally met, though steadily diminishing in size and apparent solidity. A few hours later we passed the last of them, and then met only an occasional chunk, or hummock, which seemed to be floating northward. We determined the direction by descending close to the surface of the water, and making a careful examination. There could be no doubt about it; the currents which carried these ice masses were trending northward. ”

“ Theory, as well as the accounts of the whalers, made the southeastern cape of Lancaster Sound « 173 » the seat of intense hummock action. The greater the distance from that point, the broader must be the curvature of the meeting currents, and the less perilous the conflict of the ice-masses in their rotation. ”

“ For a beginner, the under faces of the great ice hummocks below the falls on dry glaciers give the best practice, as their length and angle can be selected. Since near the crest these concave faces are often vertical or overhanging, early practice should be limited to their lower curves. ”

“ A few minutes later the fog clears up suddenly; a ray of sunshine gilds the surface of the sea; lighting up millions of patches of sparkling white, extending to the farthest limit of the horizon. These are the detached hummocks which precede and announce the field ice; they increase in size and in number as we proceed. At three o'clock in the afternoon we find ourselves in front of a large pack which blocks up the sea before us. We are obliged to change our course to extricate ourselves from the ice that surrounds us. ”

“ The shore along the entire Arctic coast of Alaska shows evidence of former glacial action, but the only glaciers to be found are in the southeastern part of the territory.
The Arctic pack, which never melts, consists of hard blue ice, made up of fields and floes of comparatively level ice, which are surrounded and interspersed with hummocks varying from ten to forty feet in height. These hummocks are formed by the broken and telescoped ice resulting from the collision and grinding together of heavy ice-floes, the hummocks being often rounded and smoothed in outline by heavy falls of snow. ”

“ Those men who do not go off on the deer hunt keep one or more seal nets set all winter, either in this way or in the third method, which can be practiced only after the daylight has come back, when the ice is thick. At this season there are frequently to be found among the hummocks what the natives call i ́glus, dome-shaped snow houses about 6 feet in diameter and 2 or 3 feet high, with a smooth round hole in the top, and communicating with the water. ”

“ The spot at which we « 67 » have been lying is in front of Barlow’s Inlet. There is no barrier between it and our vessels but the young ice, which has now attained a thickness of three inches. On the east we have the drift plain of Wellington Channel, impacted with floes, hummocks, and broken bergs; and to the south we look out upon a wild aggregation of enormous hummocks. These hummocks are totally unlike anything we saw in Baffin’s Bay. They seem to have been so disintegrated by the conflicting forces that raised them as to have lost altogether the character of tables. ”

“ The vast masses of hummocks, thirty to fifty feet high, and sometimes a quarter of a mile wide, which occur at frequent intervals and divide the ancient floes, are evidence of very violent encounters between the floes; and mud found on the ice some miles from the shore is also a proof of movement. The ice traversed by Captain Markham consisted of ancient floes of small extent and very uneven surface, separated by lofty ranges of rugged hummocks, and there were occasionally narrow streams of this year's ice, that is about five feet four inches thick, connecting the floes. ”

“ The dogs climb the hummocks with the facility of the chamois mounting the Alpine crags. One advantage they possess is, that they are not so heavy as the men and do not so readily break through the crusted snow; and then, the sledges being smaller, are more easily managed. We have reached a most formidable ridge of hummocks which we were too much exhausted to scale; and have camped in a sort of cave made by the crowding over of some ice-tables, thus saving the labor of making a burrow ”

“ The old hummocks are reduced to little rounded hills, the small crevasses are filled with new ice and snow, and the entire pack of restless floes near the bark seems more like one homogeneous mass. Everything is restful and motionless, and covered with the white silence of death. ”

“ Parry says that snow-shoes would not have been of the least service, as the surface was so irregular that the men would have been thrown down at every other step. Among the hummocks noted at this time were smooth, regular cones of ice, “resembling in shape the aromatic pastiles sold by chemists; this roundness and regularity of form indicate age, all the more recent ones being sharp and angular.” ”

“ Their very ugliness appeared to give them security, and they are, in the North, what the vulture and carrion crow are in more pleasant climes—Nature's scavengers.
The 14th and 15th of July found us still firmly beset, and sorely was our patience taxed. In-shore of us, a firm unbroken sheet of ice extended to the land, some fifteen miles distant. Across it, in various directions, like hedge-rows in an English landscape, ran long lines of piled-up hummocks, formed during the winter by some great pressure ”

“ The point of contact of the southern with the northern hummock, like the northern hummock with the main-land, is also very narrow; and to its narrowness is added another feature: it is so low, or in more technical language it is so nearly on a level with the high-water mark, that when there happens to be a strong wind from either the northeast or the southeast, the waters of the bay, on the incoming tide, will rush with great force over the slight barrier and mingle with the waters of the cove, making an island, for the time, of the larger and more southern hummock. ”

“ A second blizzard ended the advance of the worn-out, [98] thoroughly discouraged men. When the weather cleared Brooks, the mate in charge, found further progress hopeless. "The hummocks in front consist of pieces of ice from one to two feet thick, having sharp edges and piled up from ten to fifteen feet high. Single piles sometimes exceeded thirty feet in height, and at a distance have the appearance of icebergs. ”

“ The ice is tremendous, far ahead of anything we have met with. The thickness of the upraised tables is sometimes fourteen feet; and the hummocks are so ground and distorted by the rude attrition of the floes, that they rise up in cones like crushed sugar, some of them forty feet high. ”

“ The chief impediments to journeying on the ice were found to be the hummocks, often eighty feet high, which lie in ridges at certain distances, parallel perhaps to the shore. Along the line or lines where the ice is periodically broken, it is forced by pressure and the tossing of a tempestuous sea into those irregular ridges through which Wrangell had sometimes to make a way with crowbars for half a mile. ”

“ To the north; over broken ice and edge-hummocks, that is to say, hummocks « 153 » formed at the margin of floes and afterward cemented there, all of this season’s growth. Several large masses, resembling berg-ice; one, the largest, twenty-seven feet high. The water-lead margined by rude hummocky crags trending to the westward and southward from the southward and eastward, forming a rude, broken horseshoe. Distance to water, one mile.
“2. To the south; over long floes of recent ice, young snow-covered, and smooth, with few indications of heavy pressure at their junctions. ”