Icicle

“ The wind shifts from northeast and east to northwest and south, and every icicle which has tin kled on the meadow grass so long trickles down its stem and seeks its water level unerringly with a million comrades. In the ponds the ice cracks with a busy and inspiriting din and down the larger streams is whirled, grating hoarsely and crashing its way along, which was so lately a firm field for the woodman's team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. ”

“ Far above, the great ridges armed with fantastic icicles, at one moment would stand out hard and sharp against a blue-black sky, and the next be lost in a blurred cloud of driving snow, the roar of each furious gust being followed by the ominous clatter of broken icicles, and the crash of great stones torn from the summit rocks. ”

“ The ice is almost always found in positions where it receives little, if any, of the direct rays of the sun and, also, where it is scarcely, if at all, exposed to any winds. The sides of the fissures and surrounding trees generally afford the necessary protection. Some of the forms which the ice assumes in gorges, such as long pendent icicles, are also more characteristic of underground than of overground ice. ”

“ There also one sees icicles of pure ice of different sizes and heights, of which many are one or two klafters high and as thick as a man; but many only two or three spans high or higher, and as thick as an arm, and some also thinner. ”

“ Most of our opposition is in the clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a few miles above this earth—then the shining of the sun, and the ice partly melting—that note upon the ice that fell at Derby—water trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. ”

“ This last stage of. development may also be attained without rain, should the sun have sufficient power to melt some of the ice; the water from which will then trickle down to the under-side of the roll of ice, and there form icicles in a similar manner. As the sun gains in power, the wire increases in temperature, and melts away more of the ice from within; the icicles, borne down by their own weight, drop lower and lower, until the wire reaches the extreme points of the upper row, when of course the whole congealed mass soon drops off. ”

“ A vast field of aerial ice—it is inert to this earth's gravitation—but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth, and is susceptible to gravitation—by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles—then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles. ”

“ The most striking forms of subterranean ice are the ice stalactites and stalagmites. They descend from the roof as icicles or rise from it as rough cones or pyramids. The icicles are of all sorts of shapes and sizes: sometimes they are tiny; sometimes they grow downward till they reach the floor and form regular columns, in some cases no less than eleven meters in height. ”

“ All round the orifice the rocks were thickly coated with ice; and from the top of the cliff on both sides huge icicles projected downwards, until their tips touched the earth, looking like enormous trunks of elephants, or such as even mammoths might have carried. One of these immense icicles was directly in front of the aperture; while on the ground just below its point stood up a huge mass of an irregular conical shape, the convex surface of which was coated with snow that had lately fallen. ”

“ A depression in the sloping plain is called, par excellence, the ice-hole; and this is surrounded by firs and birches, which grow within three or four fathoms of the edge of the hole, so that the rays of the sun do not reach the hole in winter. Fresh snow lay on these trees; and there was nowhere any sign of melted snow, or of the formation of icicles. The basaltic débris, in which ice had been found in the summer, covers here a space of 5 fathoms long by 3 or 4 broad, immediately at the foot of a steep basaltic precipice. ”

“ Each of these was hung with icicles of various length, and nearly in the middle of the festoon, in the deepest valley of the waves that ran parallel to each other, the stream shot from the rows of icicles in irregular fits of strength, and with a body of water that varied every moment. Sometimes the stream shot into the bason in one continued current; sometimes it was interrupted almost in the midst of its fall, and was blown towards part of the waterfall at no great distance from our feet like the heaviest thunder shower. ”

“ The long ridge of ice which had been heaped up in the mid-channel had increased to thrice its former height, and the crunching and grinding of the vast masses arose above the roaring of the storm. Far up the river there came a deeper and fuller sound of the same kind, which, brought down by the wind, burst with increasing terrors upon the ear. The ridge of ice was in constant motion, being pressed and heaped up in ever-increasing masses, and, as it heaped itself up, toppling over and falling with a noise like thunder. ”

“ At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. ”

“ Occasional glimpses unfold the polish, the colors, and the graceful winding of sea-shells. A strong current in connection with the wind forces us, I am glad to say, to a more safe and comfortable distance. The last ten minutes has given us a startling illustration of the dangers of which we have been forewarned: a crack like a field-piece was followed by the falling of ice, on the opposite side of the berg, attended with a sullen roar.
We round to, and take the breeze in our faces. The ice is up the wind, square before us, and we must after it by a tack or two. ”

“ In our acceptance, there are aerial ice-fields that are remote from this earth; that break up, fragments grinding against one another, rolling in vapor and water, of different constituency in different regions, forming slowly as stratified hailstones—but that there are ice-fields near this earth, that break up into just such flat pieces of ice as cover any pond or river when ice of a pond or river is broken, and are sometimes soon precipitated to the earth, in this familiar flat formation. ”

“ All this ice, each piece different from its neighbour, is driven together by the wind and sea, and is formed into "streams" of ice, which always lie at right angles to the wind and which may be many miles in length. Loose pieces of ice in the open sea, on the weather side of these "streams," are driven before the wind more quickly than the stream itself, and are ultimately driven into the stream and form part of it. ”

“ Next day, thanks to a falling thermometer, the ice had thickened, and the floes were compacted once more into a solid mass. Some of these floes, scattered here and there like gaunt icy islands in a sea of ice, were very big, with noticeable hummocks uprearing from the main mass. As a strong southerly wind was blowing, which was favourable to our purpose, we got busy and set topsail and staysail. Seen from outboard we must have looked much more like an ice-yacht than a sea-going ship, I fancy; but under the weight of this canvas we edged a very slow and very difficult way to the north. ”

“ The number of large icebergs which float annually to great distances in the northern and southern hemispheres is extremely great, and the quantity of stone and mud which they carry about with them enormous. Some floating islands of ice have been met with from 2 to 5 miles in length, and from 100 to 225 feet in height above water, the submerged portion, according to the weight of ice relatively to sea water, being from six to eight times more considerable than the part which is visible. ”

“ We thought, indeed, that this latter circumstance might account for its being almost incessantly in motion on this coast; for heavy ice, when once it is pressed home upon the shore, and has ceased to move, generally remains quiet, until a change of wind or tide makes it slacken. But with lighter ice, the frequent breaking and doubling of the parts which sustain the strain, whenever any increase of pressure takes place, will set the whole body once more in motion till the space is again filled up. ”

“ Sheets of ice, which are so large that their whole extent of surface cannot be seen from the masthead of a vessel, are called fields. They have sometimes an area of more than a hundred square miles, and rise above the level of the sea from two to eight feet. When a piece of ice, though of a considerable size, can be distinguished in its extent, it is termed a floe. A number of sheets, large or small, joining each other, and stretching out in any particular direction, constitute a stream. ”

“ This broken-up ice is known as "Pack ice." During the breaking up of the ice, the floes crush together and their edges are broken and curled and piled with the pressure. Farther away from the open sea, well in among the solid floes, this pressure is very heavy and one floe may run over and another under the other. The edges of an extended crack, that has formed in a weak place, curl over and over and a long ridge of broken-up ice is the result. ”

“ All around the ship, ice was formed on the surface of the water; I observed the spiculæ darting with considerable velocity, and in an immense variety of forms. This ice, when newly formed, is of a bay colour, and when it has attained the thickness of window glass is called by the sailors, bay ice. It is rough on the surface, and opaque; if the frost be not interrupted by a swell of the sea, or storm, the salt-water ice often extends to an immense distance. It is by the Greenland sailors termed a field, when of such extent that the eye cannot reach its bounds. ”

“ When a quantity of ice covers the ocean in a wide level sheet of considerable extent, it is called an ice-field. Fields of this kind are often seen by navigators hundreds of miles in extent, and nearly thirty feet thick. Ice of such thickness, however, only shows five or six feet above water. When fields are broken by heavy ocean-swells, the edges are violently forced up, and fall in debris on the surface; thus hummocks or mounds are formed.
When field-ice breaks up under the influence of an ocean-swell, caused by a storm, the results are terrific. ”

“ If the earth has a fluid centre, and only a comparatively thin crust, as some suppose, there must be such tides, produced by the gravitation of the moon and sun.
Ice presents some interesting results of this viscosity. At a certain height, varying with latitude, aspect, etc., we reach the “snow line” of mountain slopes, above which the snow of winter remains unmelted during summer, and, in most cases, goes on accumulating. It soon loses its flocculent, flaky character, and becomes coherent, clear blue ice by the pressure of its own weight. ”

“ The wind blows rather strongly, and we lie to the leeward of the ice, rolling quite too much for painting. There is no accounting for these currents which flow in upon, and flow away from these bergs. The submarine ice so interferes with the upper and lower streams that the surface water rolls and whirls in a manner upon which you cannot calculate. Under the leeward here, one would naturally suppose that the current would set toward the ice, and require an effort on our part to keep away. The contrary is the case. Two good oars are busy in order to hold us up to our present position. ”

“ But it could not be the same thing in reality, for, as far as I understand the phenomenon of ground-ice, some disturbed motion of the water is necessary, to drive down below the surface the cold particles of water, which become ice the moment they strike upon any solid substance shaped like fractured stone; [75] the specific gravity of freezing water being so much less than that of water at a somewhat higher temperature, that without some disturbing cause it would not sink to the bottom. ”

“ The ice is smashed into these pressure ridges by the sheer and unimaginable force with which the floes are driven against the edge of the glacial fringe, just as farther out the pressure ridges are caused by the force with which the great floes themselves are crushed and smashed together by the force of the wind and the tides. ”

“ Bearing these facts in mind, the reader will perceive that it is the surface-water only which ever reaches so low a temperature that it is changed to ice; and he will also perceive that when the wind moves the surface-water, the particles which have become chilled by contact with the air mingle in the rolling waves with the warm waters beneath, and hence that ice can only form in sheltered places or where the water of some bay is so shoal and the current so slack that it becomes chilled to the very bottom, or where the air over the sea is uniformly calm. ”

“ After running for two hours without obstruction, we were once more mortified in perceiving that the ice, in very extensive and unusually heavy floes, closed in with the land a little to the westward of Cape Hay, and our channel of clear water between the ice and the land gradually diminished in breadth, till at length it became necessary to take in the studding sails, and to haul to the wind to look about us. I immediately left the ship, and went in a boat to examine the grounded ice off a small point of land, such as always occurs on this coast at the outlet of each ravine. ”