West Jersey Pioneer

STRANGE COUNTRY
Greenland is in all likelihood a large wedge-shaped island, covered everywhere in the interior with a sheet of ice of unknown depth. The coast-line surrounding this mer de glace is of valuable breadth, and has the aspect of a circlet of bare, bleak islands, rising to the height of about two thousand feet, and separated by deep inlets or fiords, which are the channels through which the overflow of the interior ice finds its way to the sea.

During the short Arctic summer the snow clears off this outskirting land, on which the population of Greenland lives and the Danish trading posts are built. Though a familiar subject of conversation among the colonists from the earliest times, very few of them have ever visited the great interior sea of ice; whilst the natives have a great horror of it, not only because of the dangers it presents, but from a belief that it is inhabited by evil spirits of monstrous forms.

At the fiords, where the interior ice sometimes reaches the sea, it presents "ice walls;" varying in height from one thousand to three thousand feet, according to the depth of the valley. This wall is always steep, because bergs are continually breaking off from it, thus rendering approach to it very dangerous on account, not only of the falling ice, but of the waves which it produces. One of these faces, known as Humboldt's Glacier, is about sixty miles broad.

Once fairly on the ice in the interior a dreary scene meets the view--one great ice field, unbroken in all directions, except in those in which the outskirting land is seen. The traveler, however, finds it traversed with crevasses, the bottom of which he is unable to see, or to reach with his sounding line. The surface of the field rises continuously but gently, the gradient diminishing towards the interior. In the Winter it must be covered with a deep layer of snow, and the surface must be as smooth as a glassy lake; but in the Summer this covering is converted into water, which, in the form of streams, finds its way to the sea, directly by flowing on the surface to the edge, or indirectly by falling into the crevasses, and thence by sub-glacial routes. As is the case with glaciers generally, the surface of the ice is ridged and furrowed; and so far as observations have gone, this increases towards the interior. Nowhere is there to be seen on it a trace of any living thing, or a patch of earth, or a stone, or, in short, anything whatever to remind one of the outer world. An afternoon breeze blows over it regularly with such piercing bitterness; that the explorers found their Eskimo dogs crouched under the lee of the sleds for shelter.

There seems every probability that the country is covered with one continuous, almost level field of ice, concealing or obliterating all indications of hill and valley, without a single break, for upwards of twelve hundred miles from north to south, and four hundred from east to west. Its thickness is unknown; but when it is remembered that every square mile contains six hundred and forty acres, that the weight of an inch of rain is upwards of one hundred tons per acre, and that, even exclusive of the pressure, the specific gravity of ice is about eight-ninths of that of water, it will be seen that the unbroken ice field of Greenland must have an area of upwards of three hundred million acres, and a weight of more than twenty-seven thousand million tons for every inch of its thickness.

Popular Science Review.