Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 April 1875 — Glacier Phenomena of the Arctic Regions. [ARTICLE]

Glacier Phenomena of the Arctic Regions.

In the official report of the late Austrian Polar expedition the formation and action of ice in the Arctic regions is especially noted as being a subject of much interest, and one heretofore little noticed by explorers. In a land where ice is ever forming and apparently never thawing, where it is always packed and yet keeps always packing, the query naturally arises: “What becomes of it all?” The Austrian report, based on nearly two years’ observation, informs us that, with, the exception of the landice, which clings to the coast and never reaches far into the sea, all ice—field-ice and icebergs —is continually kept in motion by the winds,- thereby causing a never-ceasing conflict, one field crushing against another, the enormous masses grinding and pulverizing each other in all seasons without rest. The force of these weighty bodies of icejmoving ever, but slowly, is tremendous, and the combat incident to their collision is often in the highest degree terrific in its effects. For days and weeks broken blocks have been observed to keep piling up and over each other many feet in height; building hourly new and fantastic shapes against the sky, until one of the inanimate antagonists had ridden clear over or “ telescoped” its opponent and sunk it beneath the waters. The cold often unites several Adds into one great mass, but only to be broken apart again by the winds, and thus the great icy regions of the extreme north are kept surging perpetually, frost fighting the presence pf heat in the water, and ice fighting ice through the ages. Only occasionally a great berg will break away and drift off into the Atlantic, at length to be dissolved in the great gulf stream.

The restless activity in which the Arctic ice-fields are kept by the winds is believed to serve a purpose in breaking up and submerging the ice to a depth sufficient to reach the warm current® which are supposed to exist at a certain depth in the northern wafers, where that which has congealed so readily a few hundred or thousand feet above is dissolved again, thus keeping up the water supply and preventing the region from becoming a solid block of ice, indissoluble and impenetrable, and, by the absence of the heat underlying all, making the polar district even more frigid than now. V . ® "When a young man in Patagonia falls in love with a girl he doesn’t visit her six nights a week and twice on Sunday -and f eed her upon molasses-candy and gum drops and sit up until two o’clock in the morning gaping and burning the old man’s oil —and that sort of thing. Not at all. Courtship in Patagonia is much more simple. He lassoes the girl, drags her home behind his horse, and that’s all the marriage ceremony necesi sary. Such a marriage ceremony will I never become popular in this country, | however, because so many of our young . men can’t afford to own a horse. : 1