386 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



there are large areas of it which are constantly frozen. Nor- 

 denskjolcl, in his " Voyage of the ' Vega,' " speaks of five 

 varieties of polar ice as occurring in the Arctic Ocean, and 

 it may be taken for granted that the area within a few 

 degrees of the pole is ice-bound the whole year round. The 

 limited communication between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans 

 is such that comparatively little heat is carried from the latter 

 to the former by means of currents, the only communication 

 between them being by way of Behring Strait, which in 

 its narrowest part, between East Cape in Asia and Cape 

 Prince of Wales in America, is barely forty miles wide. No 

 doubt much heat is carried by means of currents from the 

 Atlantic, but there are physical conditions in operation within 

 the circumpolar area which it will be necessary to consider in 

 this connection. 



Dr. Nansen's route to the pole in the " Fram," in which 

 undertaking he has been to a large extent successful, was to 

 follow along the northern shores of Europe and Asia as far 

 as 130° E. of Greenwich, then turn north-east until 150° of 

 E. longitude is reached, then proceed due north in the direc- 

 tion of the pole, and, crossing the meridian of Greenwich 

 between latitude 87° and 88°, return to Europe by way of Jan 

 Mayen Island. Nansen's theory was that a warm current 

 passes along the north-west of the New Siberian Islands, 

 and trends in the direction of the pole, meeting the Atlantic 

 currents somewhere between Spitsbergen and Greenland. 

 This theory he based on the circumstance that portions of 

 the American ship " Jeanette," which was crushed among 

 the ice-floes in 1881 near the New Siberian Islands, were 

 found three years afterwards by some Eskimo on the east 

 coast of northern Greenland. Nansen's return under great 

 hardships and the return of the "Fram" fully bear out the 

 truth of this surmise ; but it appears to me that the whole of 

 the polar area between 85° and the pole can be nothing more 

 than a mass of surface-ice, and that whatever movements 

 take place in the waters below they are necessarily very slow, 

 owing to the equability in the temperature of the waters at 

 all depths. 



Under the most favourable conditions it is only for a very 

 short period that the seas known at Barent's, Kara, and Nor- 

 denskjold, to the north of Europe and Asia, are free from ice. 

 Nordenskjold, in his celebrated voyage, was forced to go into 

 winter quarters on the 28th September, 1888, and it was not 

 until the 18th July of the following year that he found the 

 sea sufficiently free from ice to enable him to proceed. At 

 that time his ship was in latitude 67° N., or 23° from the pole. 

 Now, the ice towards the pole was still a compact mass, 

 and as far as is known there is no land in the line between 



