2dly. They may have been formed from water collected in deep fissures and
cavities that intersect the falling cliff near its margin. The inclined position of the
land immediately above this margin of peat, and the annual undennining which
is produced by the thawing of the frozen mud beneath it, produce occasional land
slips and movements of the edge of the cliff towards the sea ; these cause cracks
and fissures of the soil in various directions, but chiefly parallel to the external
face of the cliff. When these fissures descend through the black boggy soil of
the surface into the frozen mud below, they become receptacles for the formation of
ice, since the water that oozes into them is congealed upon their sides until it entirely
fills them with a wall or dyke of solid ice. The fall of a mass of mud from
the outer side of one of these walls would expose this ice, forming a case over the
inner side of the fissure in which it was accumulated.
3dly. The manner in which an extensive facing of pure ice may be formed
on these cliffs, by water during the summer trickling down their frozen surface
from the soil above, and becoming converted to ice in the course of its descent,
has been described by Captain Beechey (pages 258 and 330).
Lieutenant Belcher, in his notes, proposes another theory to explain the
occurrence of masses of pure ice immediately below the margin of peat on the top
of the cliff on the southern shore of Eschscholtz Bay. He conceives that between
the superficial bed of spongy peat, and the mass of frozen mud which forms the
body and substance of this cliff, the water oozing downwards through the peat,
during the thaw of each successive summer, is stopped at the point where it comes
into contact with the perpetually frozen earth below, and there accumulates into a
thick horizontal sheet of pure transparent ice, and that it is the broken edge of this
icy stratum which becomes exposed in the margin of the cliff during the process
of slow and gradual destruction which it is continually undergoing.
Tbis opinion, however, is I believe peculiar to Lieutenant Belcher. The
experiment made by Mr. Collie in boring horizontally into the cliff, through a
vertical face of ice, until he penetrated the frozen mud behind it, shows, that in
this case the ice was merely a superficial facing of frozen water, consolidated as it
descended the front ofthe cliff; and his further experiments in digging vertC
cally downwards, in two places, through the peat into frozen mud, and finding no
traces of any intermediate bed of ice appear unfavourable to any hypothesis as to
the formation of a stratum of pure ice between the superficial peat and subjacent
mud.
It has just been stated that Captain Beechey and Mr. Collie propose three
different solutions to explain the origin of these hanging masses of ice near the
upper margin of vertical cliffs : 1st, That they may have been formed from snow
drifted into hollows ofthe clifis, and subsequently converted into ice; 2dly, From
1
water consolidated into ice within fissures and cavities, caused by the subsidence
and falling forwards of the frozen mud; 3dly, From water trickling down the
external surface of the cliff, and freezing as it descended. To these the theory
of Lieutenant Belcher would add a fourth process, by which a horizontal bed ofice
is formed between a superficial bed of peat and the subjacent mud. Ihese hanging
masses of ice, whatever may be their origin, appear to have been so abundant at
the time of the Russian expedition to this coast, as to have made Kotzebue
and Eschscholtz imagine the entire cliff behind them to be an iceberg; an opinion
which all tlie English officers agree in considering to be erroneous, since the
view and descriptions of the cliff on the south shore of Eschscholtz Bay, given
at p. 219 of the English translation of Kotzebue’s Voyage, do not correspond
with the state of this coast when it was subsequently visited by the crew of the
Blossom.
The following are Captain Kotzebue’s obseiwations respecting it^: “ We
liad climbed much about, without discovering that we were on real icebergs.
Dr. Eschscholtz fonnd part of the bank broken down, and saw, to his astonishment,
that the interior of the mountain consisted of pure ice. At this news we all went,
provided with shovels and crows, to examine these phenomena more closely, and
soon arrived at a place where the bank rises almost perpendicularly out of the
sea to the height of a hundred feet, and then runs off, rising still higher: we saw
masses of the purest ice, ofthe height of a hundred feet, which are under a cover
of moss and grass, and could not have been produced but by some terrible revolution.
The place, which by some accident had fallen in, and is now exposed to
tlie sun and air, melts away, and a good deal of water flows into the sea. An
indisputable proof that what we saw was real ice is the quantity of mammoth’s
teeth and bones which were exposed to view by the melting, and among which I
myself found a very fine tooth. We could not assign any reason for a strong
smell, like that of burnt horn, which we perceived iu this place. The covering of
these mountains, on which the most luxuriant grass grows to a certain height, is
only half a foot thick, and consists of a mixture of clay, sand, and earth ; below
which the ice gradually melts away, the green cover sinks with it, and continues
to grow.”
Mr. Collie’s experiments, which I have before alluded to, in digging both
horizontally and vertically through the ice and peat into frozen mud, show that, at
the points where they were made, the cliff formed no part of any iceberg.
Still more decisive is the important fact, that on the two occasions when it was
* Kotzebue's Voyage of Discovery, Vol. I. p. 220.
4 h