During a rather protracted stay at Saas-Fee in Switzerland, I visited
the glacier ice cave of the Fee Glacier on the 15th and 16th of
August, 1897, both cool and rainy days. It is about half an hour's
walk from the hotel to the ice cave, which is in the snout of the Fee
glacier, below the Eggfluh. A considerable stream issued from the cave.
On nearing the opening, a strong cold air current poured out above
the stream. At the front edge of the ice, the height of the ice roof
in the centre was perhaps twelve meters and the width fifteen meters.
Around the edge, the roof formed an almost perfect curve. The ice walls
contracted in a regular manner within, and the cave became narrower and
lower, and suggested an enormous funnel cut in half, into which you
looked from the larger end. The cave also grew gradually darker, and
the darkness prevented seeing further than to a depth of some fifteen
meters. In the ice walls, just inside the entrance, were several
crevasses, of the ordinary blue-green color. They followed nearly the
same curve as the roof, but did not go through to the outside. There
were no icicles. The ice was faintly stratified in places, and at the
outer edge was brittle. It did not break into the long narrow prisms
of the ice at Saint-Georges and the Pré de Saint-Livres, but rather
into small lumps with facets, of all sorts of shapes. It was evidently
unsafe to penetrate under the ice roof, for while I stood in front of
the cave, a large lump broke off from the roof and fell with a clatter
among a lot of other ice fragments already on the moraine floor. In two
places there was a steady rain of drops from the roof, showing that the
ice was melting.
This is perhaps the glacier cave in Switzerland which is easiest to
visit, and my inspection intensified my belief in what I consider
the correct explanation of some of the phenomena in glacières. The
suggestion was that as soon as the temperature gets above freezing
point in a glacier ice cave, the only process is that of destruction of
the ice, which seems to be also the case with glacières.
LA GRAND CAVE DE MONTARQUIS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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