otten that they soon melt away
and disappear.

5. The walrus-hunters' _Bay Ice_; by which we understand level
ice-fields formed in fjords and bays along the coast, and which have
there been exposed to a comparatively early summer heat. The bay ice
therefore melts away completely during summer, and it is not
commonly much pressed together. When all the snow upon it has
disappeared, there is to be seen above the surface of the water a
little ice of the same colour as the water, while under water very
considerable portions of unmelted hard ice are still remaining. This
has given rise to the walrus-hunters' statement, which has been
warmly maintained, that the ice in autumn finally disappears by
sinking. Nearly all the ice we met with in the course of our voyage
belonged to this variety.

6. _Sea Ice_, or heavy ice, which often exhibits traces of having
been much pressed together, but has not been exposed to any early
summer heat. The walrus-hunters call it sea ice, wishing, I imagine,
to indicate thereby that it is formed in the sea farther up towards
the north. That it has drifted down from the north is indeed
correct, but that it has been formed far from land over a
considerable depth in the open sea is perhaps uncertain, as the ice
that is formed there cannot, we think, be very thick. It has rather
perhaps drifted down from the neighbourhood of some yet unknown
Polar continent. Of this ice are formed most of the ice-fields in
the seas east of Greenland, north of Spitzbergen, between
Spitzbergen and the north island of Novaya Zemlya, and north of
Behring's Straits. In the northern seas it does not melt completely
during the summer, and remains of sea ice therefore often enter as
component parts into the bay ice formed during the following winter.
The latter then becomes rough and uneven, from remnants of old sea
ice being frozen into the newly formed ice. Sea ice is often pressed
together so as to form great _torosses_ or ice-casts, formed of
pieces of ice which at first are angular and piled loose on each
other, but gradually become rounded, and freeze together into
enormous blocks of ice, which, together with the glacier ice-blocks,
form the principal mass of the ground ice found on the coasts of the
Polar lands. The water which is obtained by melting sea-ice is not
completely free from salt, but the older it is the less salt does it
contain.

East of the Bear Islands heavy sea-ice in pretty compact masses had