Water-spouts on the Britannia Gletscher, north-east Greenland

Wiseman's (1963) letter to this Journal describing a water-spout on the Aletsch Gletscher reminded me of the water-spouts encountered by members of the British North Greenland Expedition (Simpson, 1955) near the snout of the Britannia Gletscher in the summer of 1954, and prompted me to exhume two photographs from my files (Figs. 1 and 2). These water-spouts were not intermittent like those described by Wiseman (1963) and Rucklidge (1956), but were continuous gushers lasting for several days, and forming an integral part of the drainage pattern of the glacier. They are thus more akin to the spouts described by Glen (1941), who stressed the role of crevasses in englacial and subglacial drainage and stated that sometimes the water carried in this way from higher levels "attains such a pressure that it literally bursts its way through the ice, sending up a small water-spout which may continue for as a long as an hour, then dying down into a more gentle fountain".