New Lands within the Arctic Circle Narrative of the Discoveries of the Austrian Ship "Tegetthoff" in the Years 1872-1874

The ice-sheet spread over the Arctic region is the effect and sign of the low temperature which prevails within it. During nine or ten months of the year this congealing force continues to act, and if the frozen mass were not broken up by the effects of sun and wind, of rain, waves, and currents, and by the rents produced in it from the sudden increase of cold, the result would necessarily be an absolutely impenetrable covering of ice. The parts of this enormous envelope of ice sundered by these various causes now become capable of movement, and are widely dispersed in the form of ice-fields and floes.

The water-ways which separate these parts are called “leads,” or, when their extent is considerable, “ice-holes.” The meshes of this vast net, which is constantly in motion, open and close under the action of winds and currents in summer; and it is only in its southern parts that the action of waves, rain, and thaw produces any considerable detachments. Towards the end of autumn, the ice, forming anew, consolidates the interior portions, while its outer edge pushes forward, like the end of a glacier, into lower regions, until about the end of February the culminating point of congelation is attained. Motionless adhesion of the fields, which naturally reach their greatest size in winter, does not, however, exist even then; for during this period they are incessantly exposed to displacement and pressure from the currents of the sea and the air.

When the ice is more or less closed, so as to render navigation impossible, it is called “pack-ice,” and “drift-ice” when it appears in detached pieces amid predominating water. Since there are forces operating which promote the loosening process at its outer edge, and its consolidation within, it is self-evident, that the interior portions tend to the character of “pack-ice,” and its outer margin to that of “drift-ice.” This general rule, however, is so modified in many places, by local causes, currents, and winds, that we find not unfrequently at the outer margin of the ice thick barriers of pack-ice, and in the inner ice, ice-holes (polynia) and drift-ice.

Ice navigation, during its course of three hundred years, has created a number of terms to designate the external forms of ice, the meaning of which must be clearly defined. Ice formed from salt-water is called “field-ice;” that from the waters of rivers and lakes “sweet-water ice.” The latter is as hard as iron, and so transparent that it is scarcely to be distinguished from water. Icebergs are masses detached from glaciers. The words “patch,” “floe,” “field,” express relative magnitude, descriptive of the smallest ice-table up to the ice-field of many miles in diameter. The term “floe,” however, is generally applied to every kind of field-ice, without reference to its size. The ice which lies along coasts, or which adheres to a group of islands within a sound, is called “land-ice.” Sledge expeditions depend on its existence and character. Along the coast-edge land-ice is broken by the waves and tide, and the forms of its upheaval and deposition on the shore constitute the so-called “ice-foot.” Broken ice, or “brash,” is an accumulation of the smaller fragments of ice which are found only on the extreme edge of the ice-belt. “Bay-ice” is ice of recent formation, and its vertical depth is inconsiderable.