The Glaciers of the Alps Part 29

REGELATION.

(23.)

[Sidenote: FARADAY'S FIRST EXPERIMENT.]

I was led to the foregoing results by reflecting on an experiment performed by Mr. Faraday, at a Friday evening meeting of the Royal Inst.i.tution, on the 7th of June, 1850, and described in the 'Athenaeum'

and 'Literary Gazette' for the same month. Mr. Faraday then showed that when two pieces of ice, with moistened surfaces, were placed in contact, they became cemented together by the freezing of the film of water between them, while, when the ice was below 32 Fahr., and therefore _dry_, no effect of the kind could be produced. The freezing was also found to take place under water; and indeed it occurs even when the water in which the ice is plunged is as hot as the hand can bear.

A generalisation from this interesting fact led me to conclude that a bruised ma.s.s of ice, if closely confined, must re-cement itself when its particles are brought into contact by pressure; in fact, the whole of the experiments above recorded immediately suggested themselves to my mind as natural deductions from the principle established by Faraday. A rough preliminary experiment a.s.sured me that the deductions would stand testing; and the construction of the box-wood moulds was the consequence. We could doubtless mould many solid substances to any extent by suitable pressure, breaking the attachment of their particles, and re-establishing a certain continuity by the mere force of cohesion.

With such substances, to which we should never think of applying the term viscous, we might also imitate the changes of form to which glaciers are subject: but, superadded to the mere cohesion which here comes into play, we have, in the case of ice, the actual regelation of the severed surfaces, and consequently a more perfect solid. In the Introduction to this book I have referred to the production of slaty cleavage by pressure; and at a future page I hope to show that the lamination of the ice of glaciers is due to the same cause; but, as justly observed by Mr. John Ball, there is no tendency to cleave in the _sound_ ice of glaciers; in fact, this tendency is obliterated by the perfect regelation of the severed surfaces.

[Sidenote: RECENT EXPERIMENTS OF FARADAY.]

Mr. Faraday has recently placed pieces of ice, in water, under the strain of forces tending to pull them apart. When two such pieces touch at a single point they adhere and move together as a rigid piece; but a little lateral force carefully applied breaks up this union with a crackling noise, and a new adhesion occurs which holds the pieces together in opposition to the force which tends to divide them. Mr.

James Thomson had referred regelation to the cold produced by the liquefaction of the pressed ice; but in the above experiment all pressure is not only taken away, but is replaced by tension. Mr. Thomson also conceives that, when pieces of ice are simply placed together without intentional pressure, the capillary attraction brings the pressure of the atmosphere into play; but Mr. Faraday finds that regelation takes place _in vacuo_. A true viscidity on the part of ice Mr. Faraday never has observed, and he considers that his recent experiments support the view originally propounded by himself, namely, that a particle of water on a surface of ice becomes solid when placed between two surfaces, because of the increased influence due to their joint action.

CRYSTALLIZATION AND INTERNAL LIQUEFACTION.

(24.)

[Sidenote: HOW CRYSTALS ARE "NURSED."]

In the Introduction to this book I have briefly referred to the force of crystallization. To permit this force to exercise its full influence, it must have free and unimpeded action; a crystal, for instance, to be properly built, ought to be suspended in the middle of the crystallizing solution, so that the little architects can work all round it; or if placed upon the bottom of a vessel, it ought to be frequently turned, so that all its facets may be successively subjected to the building process. In this way crystals can be _nursed_ to an enormous size. But where other forces mingle with that of crystallization, this harmony of action is destroyed; the figures, for example, that we see upon a gla.s.s window, on a frosty morning, are due to an action compounded of the pure crystalline force and the cohesion of the liquid to the window-pane. A more regular effect is obtained when the freezing particles are suspended in still air, and here they build themselves into those wonderful figures which Dr. Scoresby has observed in the Polar Regions, Mr. Glaisher at Greenwich, and I myself on the summit of Monte Rosa and elsewhere.

Not only however in air, but in water also, figures of great beauty are sometimes formed. Harrison's excellent machine for the production of artificial ice is, I suppose, now well known; the freezing being effected by carrying brine, which had been cooled by the evaporation of ether, round a series of flat tin vessels containing water. The latter gradually freezes, and, on watching those vessels while the action was proceeding very slowly, I have seen little six-rayed stars of thin ice forming, and rising to the surface of the liquid. I believe the fact was never before observed, but it would be interesting to follow it up, and to develop experimentally this most interesting case of crystallization.

[Sidenote: DISSECTION OF ICE BY SUNBEAM.]

The surface of a freezing lake presents to the eye of the observer nothing which could lead him to suppose that a similar molecular architecture is going on there. Still the particles are undoubtedly related to each other in this way; they are arranged together on this starry type. And not only is this the case at the surface, but the largest blocks of ice which reach us from Norway and the Wenham Lake are wholly built up in this way. We can reveal the internal const.i.tution of these ma.s.ses by a reverse process to that which formed them; we can send an agent into the interior of a ma.s.s of ice which shall take down the atoms which the crystallizing forces had set up. This agent is a solar beam; with which it first occurred to me to make this simple experiment in the autumn of 1857. I placed a large converging lens in the sunbeams pa.s.sing through a room, and observed the place where the rays were brought to a focus behind the lens; then shading the lens, I placed a clear cube of ice so that the point of convergence of the rays might fall within it. On removing the screen from the lens, a cone of sunlight went through the cube, and along the course of the cone the ice became studded with l.u.s.trous spots, evidently formed by the beam, as if minute reflectors had been suddenly established within the ma.s.s, from which the light flashed when it met them. On examining the cube afterwards I found that each of these spots was surrounded by a liquid flower of six petals; such flowers were distributed in hundreds through the ice, being usually clear and detached from each other, but sometimes crowded together into liquid bouquets, through which, however, the six-starred element could be plainly traced. At first the edges of the leaves were unbroken curves, but when the flowers expanded under a long-continued action, the edges became serrated. When the ice was held at a suitable angle to the solar beams, these liquid blossoms, with their central spots shining more intensely than burnished silver, presented an exhibition of beauty not easily described. I have given a sketch of their appearance in Fig. 34.

[Sidenote: LIQUID FLOWERS IN ICE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 34. Liquid Flowers in lake ice.]

I have here to direct attention to an extremely curious fact. On sending the sunbeam through the transparent ice, I often noticed that the appearance of the l.u.s.trous spots was accompanied by an audible clink, as if the ice were ruptured inwardly. But there is no ground for a.s.suming such rupture, and on the closest examination no flaw is exhibited by the ice. What then can be the cause of the noise? I believe the following considerations will answer the question:--

Water always holds a quant.i.ty of air in solution, the diffusion of which through the liquid, as proved by M. Donny, has an immense effect in weakening the cohesion of its particles; recent experiments of my own show that this is also the case in an eminent degree with many volatile liquids. M. Donny has proved that, if water be thoroughly purged of its air, a long gla.s.s tube filled with this liquid may be inverted, while the tenacity with which the water clings to the tube, and with which its particles cling to each other, is so great that it will remain securely suspended, though no external hindrance be offered to its descent. Owing to the same cause, water deprived of its air will not boil at 212 Fahr., and may be raised to a temperature of nearly 300 without boiling; but when this occurs the particles break their cohesion suddenly, and ebullition is converted into explosion.

Now, when ice is formed, every trace of the air which the water contained is squeezed out of it; the particles in crystallizing reject all extraneous matter, so that in ice we have a substance quite free from the air, which is never absent in the case of water; it therefore follows that if we could preserve the water derived from the melting of ice from contact with the atmosphere, we should have a liquid eminently calculated to show the effects described by M. Donny. Mr. Faraday has proved by actual experiment that this is the case.

[Sidenote: WATER DEPRIVED OF AIR SNAPS ASUNDER.]

Let us apply these facts to the explanation of the clink heard in my experiments. On sending a sunbeam through ice, liquid cavities are suddenly formed at various points within the ma.s.s, and these cavities are completely cut off from atmospheric contact. But the water formed by the melting ice is less in volume than the ice which produces it; the water of a cavity is not able to fill it, hence a vacuous s.p.a.ce must be formed in the cell. I have no doubt that, for a time, the strong cohesion between the walls of the cell and the drop within it augments the volume of the latter a little, so as to compel it to fill the cell; but as the quant.i.ty of liquid becomes greater the shrinking force augments, until finally the particles snap asunder like a broken spring.

At the same moment a l.u.s.trous spot appears, which is a vacuum, and simultaneously with the appearance of this vacuum the clink was always heard. Mult.i.tudes of such little explosions must be heard upon a glacier when the strong summer sun shines upon it, the aggregate of which must, I think, contribute to produce the "crepitation" noticed by M. Aga.s.siz, and to which I have already referred.

[Sidenote: FIGURES IN ICE; VACUOUS SPOTS.]

In Plate VI. of the Atlas which accompanies the 'Systeme Glaciaire' of M. Aga.s.siz, I notice drawings of figures like those I have described, which he has observed in glacier-ice, and which were doubtless produced by direct solar radiation. I have often myself observed figures of exquisite beauty formed in the ice on the surface of glacier-pools by the morning sun. In some cases the s.p.a.ces between the leaves of the liquid flowers melt partially away, and leave the central spot surrounded by a crimped border; sometimes these s.p.a.ces wholly disappear, and the entire s.p.a.ce bounded by the lines drawn from point to point of the leaves becomes liquid, thus forming perfect hexagons. The crimped borders exhibit different degrees of serration, from the full leaves themselves to a gentle undulating line, which latter sometimes merges into a perfect circle. In the ice of glaciers, I have seen the internal liquefaction ramify itself like sprigs of myrtle; in the same ice, and particularly towards the extremities of the glacier, disks innumerable are also formed, consisting of flat round liquid s.p.a.ces, a bright spot being usually a.s.sociated with each. These spots have been hitherto mistaken for air-bubbles; but both they and the l.u.s.trous disks at the centres of the flowers are vacuous. I proved them to be so by plunging the ice containing them into hot water, and watching what occurred when the walls of the cells were dissolved, and a liquid connexion established between them and the atmosphere. In all cases they totally collapsed, and no trace of air rose to the surface of the warm water.

No matter in what direction a solar beam is sent through lake-ice, the liquid flowers are all formed parallel to the surface of freezing. The beam may be sent parallel, perpendicular, or oblique to this surface; the flowers are always formed in the same planes. Every line perpendicular to the surface of a frozen lake is in fact an axis of symmetry, round which the molecules so arrange themselves, that, when taken down by the delicate fingers of the sunbeam, the six-leaved liquid flowers are the result.

In the ice of glaciers we have no definite planes of freezing. It is first snow, which has been disturbed by winds while falling, and whirled and tossed about by the same agency after it has fallen, being often melted, saturated with its own water, and refrozen: it is cast in shattered fragments down cascades, and reconsolidated by pressure at the bottom. In ice so formed and subjected to such mutations, definite planes of freezing are, of course, out of the question.

[Sidenote: CONSt.i.tUTION OF GLACIER-ICE.]

The flat round disks and vacuous spots to which I have referred come here to our aid, and furnish us with an entirely new means of a.n.a.lysing the internal const.i.tution of a glacier. When we examine a ma.s.s of glacier-ice which contains these disks, we find them lying in all imaginable planes; not confusedly, however--closer examination shows us that the disks are arranged in groups, the members of each group being parallel to a common plane, but the parallelism ceases when different groups are compared. The effect is exactly what would be observed, supposing ordinary lake-ice to be broken up, shaken together, and the confused fragments regelated to a compact continuous ma.s.s. In such a jumble the original planes of freezing would lie in various directions; but no matter how compact or how transparent ice thus const.i.tuted might appear, a solar beam would at once reveal its internal const.i.tution by developing the flowers parallel to the planes of freezing of the respective fragments. A sunbeam sent through glacier-ice always reveals the flowers in the planes of the disks, so that the latter alone at once informs us of its crystalline const.i.tution.

[Sidenote: VACUOUS CELLS MISTAKEN FOR AIR-CELLS.]

Hitherto, as I have said, these disks have been mistaken for bubbles containing air, and their flattening has been ascribed to the pressure to which they have been subjected. M. Aga.s.siz thus refers to them:--"The air-bubbles undergo no less curious modifications. In the neighbourhood of the _neve_, where they are most numerous, those which one sees on the surface are all spherical or ovoid, but by degrees they begin to be flattened, and near the end of the glacier there are some that are so flat _that they might be taken for fissures when seen in profile_. The drawing represents a piece of ice detached from the gallery of infiltration. All the bubbles are greatly flattened. But what is most extraordinary is, that, far from being uniform, _the flattening is different in each fragment_; so that the bubbles, according to the face which they offer, appear either very broad or very thin." This description of glacier-ice is correct: it agrees with the statements of all other observers. But there are two a.s.sumptions in the description which must henceforth be given up; first, the bubbles seen like fissures in profile are not air-bubbles at all, but vacuous spots, which the very const.i.tution of ice renders a necessary concomitant of its inward melting; secondly, the a.s.sumption that the bubbles have been _flattened_ by pressure must be abandoned; for they are found, and may be developed at will, in lake-ice on which no pressure has been exerted.

[Sidenote: CELLS OF AIR AND WATER.]

But these remarks dispose only of a certain cla.s.s of cells contained in glacier-ice. Besides the liquid disks and vacuous spots, there are innumerable true bubbles entangled in the ma.s.s. These have also been observed and described by M. Aga.s.siz; and Mr. Huxley has also given us an accurate account of them. M. Aga.s.siz frequently found air and water a.s.sociated in the same cell. Mr. Huxley found no exception to the rule: in each case the bubble of air was enclosed in a cell which was also partially filled with water. He supposes that the water may be that of the originally-melted snow which has been carried down from the _neve_ unfrozen. This hypothesis is worthy of a great deal more consideration than I have had time to give to it, and I state it here in the hope that it will be duly examined.

My own experience of these a.s.sociated air and water cells is derived almost exclusively from lake-ice, in which I have often observed them in considerable numbers. In examining whether the liquid contents had ever been frozen or not, I was guided by the following considerations. If the air be that originally entangled in the solid, it will have the ordinary atmospheric density at least; but if it be due to the melting of the walls of the cell, then the water so formed being only eight-ninths of that of the ice which produced it, _the air of the bubble must be rarefied_. I suppose I have made a hundred different experiments upon these bubbles to determine whether the air was rarefied or not, and in every case found it so. Ice containing the bubbles was immersed in warm water, and always, when the rigid envelope surrounding a bubble was melted away, the air suddenly collapsed to a fraction of its original dimensions. I think I may safely affirm that, in some cases, the collapse reduced the bubbles to the thousandth part of their original volume. From these experiments I should undoubtedly infer, that in lake-ice at least, the liquid of the cells is produced by the melting of the ice surrounding the bubbles of air.

But I have not subjected the bubbles of glacier-ice to the same searching examination. I have tried whether the insertion of a pin would produce the collapse of the bubbles, but it did not appear to do so. I also made a few experiments at Rosenlaui, with warm water, but the result was not satisfactory. That ice melts internally at the surfaces of the bubbles is, I think, rendered certain by my experiments, but whether the water-cells of glacier-ice are entirely due to such melting, subsequent observers will no doubt determine.

[Sidenote: "LIQUID LIBERTY."]

I have found these composite bubbles at all parts of glaciers; in the ice of the moraines, over which a protective covering had been thrown; in the ice of sand-cones, after the removal of the superinc.u.mbent debris; also in ice taken from the roofs of caverns formed in the glacier, and which the direct sunlight could hardly by any possibility attain. That ice should liquefy at the surface of a cavity is, I think, in conformity with all we know concerning the physical nature of heat.

Regarding it as a motion of the particles, it is easy to see that this motion is less restrained at the surface of a cavity than in the solid itself, where the oscillation of each atom is controlled by the particles which surround it; hence _liquid liberty_, if I may use the term, is first attained at the surface. Indeed I have proved by experiment that ice may be melted internally by heat which has been conducted through its external portions without melting them. These facts are the exact complements of those of "regelation;" for here, two moist surfaces of ice being brought into close contact, their liquid liberty is destroyed and the surfaces freeze together.

THE MOULINS.

(25.)

[Sidenote: MOULIN OF GRINDELWALD GLACIER.]

[Sidenote: DEPTH OF THE SHAFT.]

The first time I had an opportunity of seeing these remarkable glacier-chimneys was in the summer of 1856, upon the lower glacier of Grindelwald. Mr. Huxley was my companion at the time, and on crossing the so-called Eismeer we heard a sound resembling the rumble of distant thunder, which proceeded from a perpendicular shaft formed in the ice, and into which a resounding cataract discharged itself. The tube in fact resembled a vast organ-pipe, whose thunder-notes were awakened by the concussion of the falling water, instead of by the gentle flow of a current of air. Beside the shaft our guide hewed steps, on which we stood in succession, and looked into the tremendous hole. Near the first shaft was a second and smaller one, the significance of which I did not then understand; it was not more than 20 feet deep, but seemed filled with a liquid of exquisite blue, the colour being really due to the magical shimmer from the walls of the moulin, which was quite empty. As far as we could see, the large shaft was vertical, but on dropping a stone into it a shock was soon heard, and after a succession of b.u.mps, which occupied in all seven seconds, we heard the stone no more. The depth of the moulin could not be thus ascertained, but we soon found a second and still larger one which gave us better data. A stone dropped into this descended without interruption for four seconds, when a concussion was heard; and three seconds afterwards the final shock was audible: there was thus but a single interruption in the descent.

Supposing all the acquired velocity to have been destroyed by the shock, by adding the s.p.a.ce pa.s.sed over by the stone in four and in three seconds respectively, and making allowance for the time required by the sound to ascend from the bottom, we find the depth of the shaft to be about 345 feet. There is, however, no reason to suppose that this measures the depth of the glacier at the place referred to. These shafts are to be found in almost all great glaciers; they are very numerous in the Unteraar Glacier, numbers of them however being empty. On the Mer de Glace they are always to be found in the region of Trelaporte, one of the shafts there being, _par excellence_, called the Grand Moulin. Many of them also occur on the Glacier de Lechaud.

As truly observed by M. Aga.s.siz, these moulins occur only at those parts of the glacier which are not much rent by fissures, for only at such portions can the little rills produced by superficial melting collect to form streams of any magnitude. The valley of unbroken ice formed in the Mer de Glace near Trelaporte is peculiarly favourable for the collection of such streams; we see the little rills commencing, and enlarging by the contributions of others, the trunk-rill pouring its contents into a little stream which stretches out a hundred similar arms over the surface of the glacier. Several such streams join, and finally a considerable brook, which receives the superficial drainage of a large area, cuts its way through the ice.