This ice mass is supposed to be just like the con tinental glacier that once covered so much land.
(Fig. 53.) It creeps slowly along down to the sea, and there huge chunks break off and float away as icebergs. (Secs.159,251.) Sometimes they wreck ships that happen to be sailing past Newfoundland. Ice bergs floating south meet the warm Gulf Stream, which melts them. The windstorms that rip across the Greenland ice are so terrible that only one or two parties have ever made the hard journey across the ice cap.
359. Animal life in a sea of floating ice.— The Arctic Sea north of Alaska and between the islands that lie west of Greenland is so full of blocks of floating ice that only one ship, the 46-ton Gjoa, has ever been through it, and it took Captain Amundsen three years, 1903-1906, to make the passage. (Fig. 289.) But there is life even in this polar sea, and on its ice floes, some of which may be as small as a table, some as large as a city block, and some even a mile or two long.
Many fish and other water animals live in these cold waters. The shrimp is the chief food of seals that live under the ice and come up from time to time to breathe at holes, or to crawl out and rest. Often, while the seal sleeps on the ice cake, the polar bear steals up to catch him. Thus the bear gets his living.
Each polar bear, as he prowls about the ;hone or on cakes of floating ice, is followed by Arctic foxes, sometimes by as many as ;ix. When the bear catches a seal and begins eat it, his fox followers sit at a safe dis tance, barking at him. When the bear finishes his feast and goes away, the foxes then come and eat the leavings. After ward they hunt up the bear and wait for him to catch another seal.
An American explorer, Stefansson, has learned how to live on ice floes, and how to get a living much as the animals do. He can catch seals better than the bear can. With one team of dogs, a tent, a rifle and car tridges, he can travel about on the ice cakes and shoot enough seals to feed himself and his dogs. He has traveled for hundreds of
miles over the Arctic Ocean, camping on floating ice and stepping from one block to another, studying the things he found there.
360. The Antarctic continent.—While the knowledge of the Arctic regions is still fresh in our minds, it will be well to study about Antarctica (Fig. 290), the cold land about the south pole.
What is the latitude of the part of the Antarctic land nearest the equator? (Fig. 290.) Find a place in North America hav ing the same latitude. Point out places on the coast of North America as far from the equator as is the tip of South America, of Africa, and of New Zealand.
The Antarctic Region differs from the Arctic in having a continent at the pole and wide seas all around.
The Antarctic continent is larger than the United States, but no one lives there. Ice caps cover all of it except a few rocky shores. On all sides the ice creeps down from the land and works out into the sea. Ships have sailed for days in front of solid cliffs of ice that are much higher than the highest mast of a ship. Enormous pieces of the ice sheet, some of them as big as a city or a town ship, break off and float away before the west winds, leaving a high wall of ice rising from the cold sea.
Brave men anxious to find the South Pole have risked their lives and died in the terrible journey over this Antarctic ice. The North Pole was found to be on an ice-covered sea, but the South Pole is on an icy plateau nearly twice as high as Mt. Washington.
The southernmost homes of men are on Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands. (Sec. 837.) Between this land and the Antarctic ice wall there are a few small, cold, damp islands, inhabited by seals, wal ruses, and penguins. Penguins are queer looking birds that cannot fly, but like the seals swim in the sea, and get their living by catching fish and small animals.