Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1887 — Ice Rivers. [ARTICLE]

Ice Rivers.

Ordinary glaciers are accumulations of ice descending along valleys from snow-covered elevations. They are ice streams, 200 to 5,000 feet deep or more, fed by the snows and frozen mist above the limit of perpetual frost. They stretch on 4,000 to 7,000 feet below the snow-line, because they are so large that the heat of summer can not melt them. Some of them reach down into open cultivated tracts, the extremities of the Grindenwald and Chamouni glaciers, for instance, being found within a few hundred feet of the gard ns and houses of the in habitants of the valleys. The best known glaciers are those of the Alps—numbering 1,150, as Prof. Heim has just ascertained, and covering a total area of more than 500 square miles—but important ones also occur in the Pyrenees, the mountains of Norway, Spitzbergen, Iceland, the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the southern extremity of the Andes, in Greenland, and on Antartic lands. One of the Spitzbergen glaciers stretches eleven miles along the coast, and projects in icy cliffs 100 to 400 feet high. The great Humboldt glacier of Greenland, north of the seventy-ninth paralell, has a breadth of forty-five miles at the foot, where it enters the sea. This glacier is but one of many in that icy land, in the interior of which, according to Nordenskjold, one may pass over a vast ocean of ice and snow, 1,200 miles long and 400 miles wide, without seeing a plant, a stone, or a patch of earth. Riches should be admitted into our houses, but not into our hearts.