These slides are from the film "Beneath the Polar Sun" -- relating an attempt about ten years ago by a group of experienced kayakers to navigate the full length of the Nares Strait between North Greenland and Axel Heiberg Island. They expected to find flat ice floes and intersecting navigable leads of clear water; what they found was a nighmare of smashed ice fragments and brash ice stretching from horizon to horizon, with huge pressure ridges on long stretches of the shoreline. They expected to travel 300 km. but gave up after 30 km of unremitting toil.
Ever since David Sugden and I wrote our extended report called "Coastal Geomorphology of High Latitudes" many years ago, I have been intrigued by the physical variations that exist in the real world of marine limits and raised shorelines. There is quite enough variation is it is, on coasts where processes are determined by relatively ice-free conditions -- but things get vastly more complex where brash ice fragments or bergy bits are stranded on the shore.
Where an ice foot (or fringe of landfast sea ice) exists, there is considerable variation, partly dependent on the amount of brash ice or bergy bits incorporated -- derived from glaciers and icebergs. And there is more variation again in freshwater environments like the shores of the Great Lakes, where much frazil ice may be incorporated, and where spectacular spring floods occur, such as in the St Lawrence and Mackenzie Rivers when the winter ice is flushed out with dramatic and sometimes catastrophic consequences. Similar catastrophic spring floods also occur in the lower parts of the great north-flowing Siberian rivers -- the Yenisei, Lena and Ob.
In Antarctic raised beaches we often see pits and ridges on the pebble banks, with rapid lateral variations in beach sediments including particle size. Bulldozed or pushed ridges of beach material are evidence of vast ice pressure on the shoreline associated with tidal streams or onshore winds; accumulations of brash ice and pack ice fragments may be piled up to heights of 20m above HWM, forming more or less impenetrable barriers to access and causing damage to coastal infrastructure.
One of our biggest fears when paddling om Nordvestfjord in 1962 was that an onshore wind might push all of the floating ice fragments in the fjord tight up against the shoreline, trapping us either inside or ourside the barrier. Being trappped on the inside was preferable, but not to be welcomed. But being trapped on the outside of a brash ice barrier was potentially lethal, since our canvas kayaks could not have coped with any attempt to paddle though it, and and neither could we have walked across it to the shore..........
