The Geographical Journal (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society): Volume XII, No. 2 [‎276v] (55/154)

146 AN EXPLORATION IN 1897 OF SOME OF THE GLACIERS OF SPITSBERGEN.
glaciers, in fact, as the Guggi glacier, which lies in the hollcnv between
the Jungfrau and the Mr'inch. They have crept farther back than it,
because for some reason they had the better start, but the Guggi glacier
now emulates their former vigorous initiative. The cliffs at its head
are being continually broken and worn away by the action of frost.
The rocks that fall from them either tumble on to the neve, and are
carried down by it, or roll into the bergschrund, and so get under the ice,
where no doubt they are ground to dust, and do some excavating in the
process. That, however, can only be in the upper regions; lower
down only the waters below the glacier excavate, but not the glacier
itself, except, perhaps, at the edge of some subglacial cliff where an
icefall is formed. In this way the rocks of the north face of the ridge
between the Jungfrau and Munch are being eaten away, and the ridge
itself is nut merely being lowered, but its crest is being pushed back
ward towards the south. Every yard of its movement is made at the
expense of the Jungfrau glacier. Let the process go forward for a
sufficiently long time, and the area now occupied by the upper basin
■of the Jungfrau glacier will be occupied by a snow-basin lying at a
lower level, and draining northward down the Guggi glacier.
Similar, I suggest, may have been the development of what is now the
Great Aletsch glacier. Originally, according to this theory, the Lotschen
glacier stretched back to the Finsteraarhorn, and had for its left bank a
ridge parallel to, but south of, the range of which the Aletschhorn is
now the culminating point. The Aletsch glacier’s original head was on
the south face of this range, but the glacier ate its way backwards, its
head advanced to the north, finally broke its way right through the range
and drew off a portion of the ice of the Lotschen glacier.* The snout
of the Lotschen glacier was thus disconnected from its former neve, and
a pass (the Lotschenliicke) was formed between them. The neve, at
what is now called the Place de la Concorde, flowed as a great icefall
over the remnant of the old left bank of the original glacier. It no
•doubt deepened and widened the breach, and as it did so lowered the
level of the snow in the upper reservoir, whose various branches were
thus enabled, each in its place, to creep backwards also at the expense
of the plateau. Thus were formed the Ewig Schnee Feld, the Jungfrau
hirn, and the other neve tributaries of the present great glacier. The
great icefall gradually diminished in turbulence as the cliff beneath it
was broken and rounded away, till now it is merely represented by the
•crevassed area just below the Concordia Hut.
A\ hether, in fact, the processes thus suggested took place, or whether
watei-action forestalled the glaciers by cutting through the ridges in
daj s anterior to the glaciation of the Alps, I am not authority to
pronounce. But the position that I do maintain is this—that glaciers
The W alliser Viescher glacier was similarly employed.