The St. Johns herald., 1895-01-24
rCEBERes ON THE ATLANTIC.
Some of Them Che Thousand Fect High
 and Seven Miles Thick.

1 Some of Them Che Thousand Feot High l and Seven Miles Thick.
 "You see stories about big icebegrs in the Atlantic sometimes" said an old salt the other day to Washington Post i reporter, but do you know they can't l hold candle to those that are found in the South Atlantic, in the Antarctic ocean? Why, berg in the Arctics three-fourths of mile long and three hundred fee thigh is thought to be enor- nous, and so it is, too, if you calculate it's cubic contents and remember that only : one-seventh of the whole mass floats above water, the balance of it being be- i low. The weight of berg this size is about two billion tons.
 But in the Antarctic oceans the bergs are something stupendous. Some that have been noticed from time to time were four hundred to one thousand feet above the water, and were from three to five miles long. One can scarcely realize the immensity of such masses of ice.
 i 'Where do they come from? Why,
 
 sure. You know a good many expedi- tions have been sent out to explore these seas from time to time, Capt. Cook in 1773 being one of the early ones. He discovered, as others did, what he SUD- posed to be land, but it has generally happened that when one explorer has set down land on his charts second one finds water one thousand fathoms deep.
 ''Oh, about the ice. To be sure. We'll, these explorers, when they penetrate to about seventy-five degrees south lati- tude, come across a great wall of ice rising above the water higher than the masthead and extending as far as the eye can see. Capt. Ross, where he saw it, says it stretched along for four hun dred and fifty miles and it was from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet above the water. When such a mass of ice is about, do you wonder there are big icebergs?
 ''What sort of land is there at the south pole? We'll, that's rather hard to say, since hardly anyone has ever seen any of it, and that only at a distance. Ross discovered some volcanoes about 7S degrees south latitude, which is as far as anyone has ever penetrated, but most of the other land discovered has generally turned out to be only ice. ''It is supposed that the land at the pole itself is cluster of low islands, maybe with mountains, but these are all covered with ice. Taking the small est slope down which ice will flow at one foot in two hundred and eleven, it is estimated that the ice at the pole is seven miles thick. Yes, it does seem very big yarn, but then when you know that about thirty or forty feet of snow falls there during single year you can easily see that it cannot all melt in the short summer season, and it goes on accommodating year after year.
 ''The expedition from Australia? Yes, there is some talk about that, and the colonies have raised four or five thousand pounds sterling to pay ex- ] penses. But it can't pay in any com mercial sense. No one lives down there. There is no trade, and it is the height of the improbable that any expedition can reach the pole overland. We'll, if : they do, what then? It would solve no problem of science and would be of no benefit to the human race. The at tempt to find it is only another one of those foolhardy things that men often risk their lives to do, and all to no pur- pose.
 When you again see an account of an Atlantic liner that has run afoul of an iceberg and had close shave from shipwreclx, remember that the ones she is likely to encounter are but pigmies compared with the giants of the south ! seas"