Glaciers of Greenland

J. Dorman, Steele, Ph.D.

- 1877 -

Glacial Phenomena  are displayed on the grandest scale in Greenland. On its western coast is a glacier 1,200 miles long. It presents to the voyager a perpendicular wall of ice 2,000 feet high. A great glacial river, says kane, seeking outlets at every valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and the Greenland seas, an at least reaching the northern limit of the land which has borne it up, pours a mighty frozen torrent into Arctic space. Unlike the Alpine glaciers, which melt in the warm valleys below, this empties into the ocean, and vast masses becoming detached, are floated away, to be dissolved in the milder water of southern seas. Thousands of these icebergs throng the northern ocean, freighted with debris to be deposited on the sea-bottom of lower latitudes, Could we examine the track of these ice-rafts, we should doubtless find striae cut in the polished rocks, and blocks deposited in long trains where the bergs had struck, scraped along by their enormous momentum and at last stranded.

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source: Steele, J. Dorman, PhD., The story of Rocks. Fourteen weeks in Popular Geology, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, A.S.Barnes and Company, 1877 

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