Ice island

“ These originate when shelf ice, such as that found on the northern coast of Greenland and in the bays of Ellesmere Island, breaks up. As a rule, Arctic ice islands are not as large as the tabular icebergs found in the Antarctic. They attain a thickness of up to 55 meters and on the average extend 5 to 7 meters above the sea surface. Both tabular icebergs and ice islands possess a gently rolling surface. Because of their deep draft, they are influenced much more by current than wind. Arctic ice islands have been used as floating scientific platforms from which polar research has been conducted. ”

“ Each winter thousands of icebergs and vast fields of floe-ice drift across from Greenland, and pile themselves up on its western coast, clasping the island in a deadly embrace, and threatening its very life with their chill breath.
Only the coasts of the island are inhabited, while the interior is a desolate, lifeless, and almost unexplored waste of lava plains, bogs, volcanic mountains, and ice-filled valleys. The people live in huts built of wrecked timbers, picked up in the western fiords, or of blocks of lava roofed with turf. ”

“ It is a country doomed by nature never once to feet the warmth of the sun's rays, but to lie buried in everlasting snow and ice. Whatever ports there may be on the coast, they are almost entirely covered with frozen snow of a vast thickness. If however, any one of them should be so far open as to invite a ship into it, she would run the risk of being fixed there for ever, or of coming out in an ice island. ”

“ At four o'clock the next morning, being in the latitude of 62° 10' south, longitude 172° west, we saw the first ice island, 11° 1/2 farther south than the first ice we saw the preceding year after leaving the Cape of Good Hope. At the time we saw this ice, we also saw an antarctic peterel, some grey albatrosses, and our old companions pintadoes and blue peterels. The wind kept veering from S.W. by the N.W. to N.N.E. for the most part a fresh gale, attended with a thick haze and snow ”

“ The eastern third of the island is composed of crystalline rocks, and rises to an irregular ice-clad tableland some 3,000 feet in altitude. The rise to the interior is somewhat abrupt, and the landscape, seen from the sea, shows an interior ice-cap in the distance, with bare rocky hills rising irregularly above the slopes of the glaciers flowing down the valleys to the sea. The western part of the island is formed of limestone, and is a flat tableland cut by deep narrow fiords that extend inland many miles from the coast, and are continued beyond the salt water as the valleys of small rivers. ”

“ It is quite evident that during the height of the glacial epoch there was a combination of causes at work which led to a large portion of North-western Europe and Eastern America being buried in ice to a greater extent even than Greenland is now, since it certainly extended beyond the land and filled up all the shallow seas between our islands and Scandinavia. ”

“ We now very frequently fell in with high islands of ice. On the 24th, we had fresh gales with hazy and cold weather, and met so many ice islands, that we were frequently obliged to alter our course to avoid them. On the 25th, we had strong gales with very heavy and frequent squalls: as we were now drawing near Cape Horn, and in all the charts of Terra del Fuego which I had seen, there is an island laid down, bearing from the Cape about south-south-west, and called Diego Ramirez, distant from the land ten or twelve leagues ”

“ The first stage of their journey promised anxious moments, for it lay over the ice bridging the dangerous waters of Dolphin and Union Straits. Through this twenty-mile channel, dividing Victoria Island from the mainland, the current runs like a mill race. You doubtless know that running water is always the last to freeze and the first to thaw; the ice is never as thick here as in other places; and late in the spring (it was now May) might not be any too strong to bear a loaded sled. ”

“ Indeed, until within these last few years, the passage, I believe, was altogether impracticable, in consequence of the continuous fields of ice which used to drift down the narrow channel between the frozen continent and the northern extremity of the island. Lately, some great change seems to have taken place in the lie of the Greenland ice; and during the summer-time you can pass through, though late in the year a solid belt binds the two shores together. ”

“ It was seen first in the east, a little above the horizon; and, in a short time, spread over the whole heavens.
The 21st, in the morning, having little wind and a smooth sea, two favourable circumstances for taking up ice, I steered for the largest ice island before us, which we reached by noon. At this time, we were in the latitude of 59° S., longitude 92° 30' E.; having about two hours before seen three or four penguins. Finding here a good quantity of loose ice, I ordered two boats out, and sent them to take some on board. ”

“ On the evening of August 16, sailing before the wind, we forced our way through the ice of the Stor-Fiord, and two days afterwards arrived at Hope Island, the steep, rocky walls of which rose out of the fog just as we were close under it. [61] We found the icebergs still firmly grounded, precisely as we had observed them three weeks before. As an unusually strong current was running towards the south-west at the rate of two miles an hour, great caution was needed when we landed in the whale-boat amid rocks and cliffs not marked on any chart. ”

“ The ship wore round fairly, the yards were steadied, and we stood off on the other tack, leaving behind us, directly under our larboard quarter, a large ice island, peering out of the mist, and reaching high above our tops, while astern; and on either side of the island, large tracts of field-ice were dimly seen, heaving and rolling in the sea. ”

“ The distance was too great to make a good study of the land. In a general way this coast-line resembles the northern parts of the Greenland landscape. About the largest islands there are many small, ice-free isles, or rocks, which serve as resting-places for seals, penguins, cormorants, and gulls. On the larger islands, and especially on Livingston Island, there are high peaks and rounded, dome-like hills, which are crowned with snow, but whose sides are mostly bare and wind-rasped. The valleys are filled with huge glaciers, which send tongues out to the sea. ”

“ The harvests of ice are carried across the Arctic Ocean until they are brought up by the American coast and islands, where they are completely stopped. Then the ice gradually increases from annual snow falls and other causes until it becomes upwards of a hundred feet in thickness. There is some movement in the summer, and a tendency eastward to the north of Ellesmere Island and Greenland, to join the Greenland current. ”

“ I have seen it often when the sun has shone through blue seas on yellow sands—so Mars is not so unearth-like as many planets are.
The Ice Island seemed to be a vast mass of icebergs that had attached themselves to an island covered with vegetation. ”

“ The very sides and craggy summits of the lofty mountains were cased with snow and ice; but the quantity which lay in the valleys is incredible; and at the bottom of the bays the coast was terminated by a wall of ice of considerable height. It can hardly be doubted that a great deal of ice is formed here in the water, which in the spring is broken off, and dispersed over the sea; but this island cannot produce the ten-thousandth part of what we saw; so that either there must be more land, or the ice is formed without it. ”

“ This kind of ice is much more dangerous than the large islands, for those can be seen at a distance, and kept away from; but the field-ice, floating in great quantities, and covering the ocean for miles and miles, in pieces of every size,— large, flat, and broken cakes, with here and there an island rising twenty and thirty feet, and as large as the ship's hull,— this it is very difficult to sheer clear of. ”

“ Natural resources: sand and gravel aggregates, placer deposits,
polymetallic nodules, oil and gas fields, fish, marine mammals
(seals and whales)
Natural hazards: ice islands occasionally break away from northern Ellesmere Island; icebergs calved from glaciers in western Greenland and extreme northeastern Canada; permafrost in islands ”

“ The passage to the northward of the island was not even so clear as this by above two miles of ice, so that in every respect our present route was to be preferred to the other; and thus, after a vexatious delay of six weeks at the eastern entrance of the strait, and at a time when we had every reason to hope that nature, though hitherto tardy in her annual disruption of the ice, had at length made an effort to complete it, did we find our progress once more opposed by a barrier of the same continuous, impenetrable, and hopeless nature as at first! ”

“ Owing to the peculiar distribution of land and sea upon the globe, more than its fair proportion of the warm equatorial waters is directed towards the western shores of Europe, the result being that the British Isles, Norway, and Spitzbergen, have all a milder climate than any other parts of the globe in corresponding latitudes. A very small portion of the Arctic regions, however, obtains this benefit, and it thus remains, generally speaking, a land of snow and ice, with too short a summer to nourish more than a very scanty and fugitive vegetation. ”

“ A short time ago it was at least two thousand feet below the surface of the over- sweeping ice; and under present climatic conditions it will soon take its place as a glacier-polished island in the middle of the fiord, like a thousand others in the magnificent archipelago. Emerging from its icy sepulchre, it gives a most telling illustration of the birth of a marked feature of a landscape. In this instance it is not the mountain, but the glacier, that is in labor, and the mountain itself is being brought forth. ”

“ Young ice will constantly form about you, but I do not think you need fear its detaining you until after the third week in March. I am afraid it may be very cold and unpleasant waiting in such a situation, and possibly better and safer conditions for the ship can be found farther to the west and nearer to the decayed Glacier ice south of Black Island. ”

“ How astonishingly bare the land looks; it is more barren than Beechey Island, whilst the rock contains far fewer fossils! On this day nine years ago the harbor and sea continued covered with ice, and the ships ('Enterprise' and 'Investigator') were unable to escape. At some period since then the ice has been pressed in upon the low shingle point; it has forced the launch up before it, and left her broadside on to the beach, with both bows stove in, and in want of considerable repairs, but the means are all at hand for executing them. ”

“ We are able to understand the enormous pressure exerted by the ice along the newly-discovered coasts, and we see exactly the same thing as described by M’Clintock on Prince Patrick Island, by M’Clure on Banks Island, and by Collinson, in a less degree, on the coast north of America. The conclusion was inevitable that a current drives the ice across the polar ocean from east to west, with a set down the east coast of Greenland. ”

“ It is evident that the change of climate requisite to produce such marvellous effects in the British Isles could not have been local, and we accordingly find strikingly similar proofs that Scandinavia and all northern Europe have also been covered with a huge ice-sheet; while we have already seen that a similar gigantic glacier buried the Alps, carrying granitic blocks to the Jura, where it deposited them at a height of 3,450 feet above the sea ”

“ The ocean-currents which wash the coasts of Iceland from opposite directions have a considerable influence on its climate. The south and west coasts, fronting the Atlantic, and exposed to the Gulf Stream, remain ice-free even in winter, and enjoy a comparatively mild temperature, while the cold Polar current, flowing in a south-western direction from Spitzbergen to Jan Mayen and Iceland, conveys almost every year to the eastern and northern shores of the island large masses of drift-ice, which sometimes do not disappear before July or even August. ”

“ But a wreck, a piece of woodwork, a broken mast, or a few planks, remain floating; they offer some resistance to the waves, they will not melt; but this bit of ice, this solidified water, must dissolve with the heat of the sun!
This piece of ice had formed the thickest part of the island, and this will explain its having lasted so long. A layer of earth and plenty of vegetation covered it, and the base of ice must have been of considerable thickness. The long bitter Polar winters must have "fed it with fresh ice," in the countless centuries during which it was connected with the mainland. ”

“ In the Antarctic regions there are extensive highlands and lofty mountains, and these are everywhere exposed to the influence of moist sea-air; and it is here, accordingly, that we find the nearest approach to a true ice-cap covering the whole circumference of the Antarctic continent, and forming a girdle of ice-cliffs which almost everywhere descend to the sea. Such Antarctic islands as South Georgia, South Shetland, and Heard Island, are often said to have perpetual snow at sea-level ”

“ If the ice islands in the Atlantic, like lumps of ice in a pitcher of water, chill our climate in spring, they are at the same time agents in preventing a still more serious secular chilling which might result from the growth without limit of the Arctic snow and ice. They are also constantly employed in wearing down the Arctic land, and aided by the great northern current from Davis's Straits, in scattering stones, boulders and sand over the banks along the American coast. ”