4 0. B. B0GGILD. BOTTOM DEPOSITS. [norw. POL. EXP. 



As the Fram Expedition has made clear that there is nearly always 

 a drift over the Polar Sea from the Bering Strait to the Sea between Green- 

 land and Spilzhergen, and that there is no land anywhere in the neighbour- 

 hood of the Frams's drift, from which icebergs could originate, it is now to be 

 regarded as absolutely impossible that this sea bottom could be sprinkled 

 with coarse material in that way. 



All the ice found must therefore consist of sea ice — which cannot possibly 

 contain any earthy matter — or to a much smaller extent, of coast or river- 

 ice from Siberia and N. America. At these places the bottom as far as is 

 known, chiefly consists of fine loose material such as sand and clay, and the 

 conveyance of stony material from these districts must therefore also be 

 extremely small. 



Furthermore, other sources from which Ihe sea bottom very largely 

 derives coarse material such as the presence of solid rocks or moraines, 

 are in these regions entirely missing, and the combined result of all these 

 factors is therefore the quite surprising one that there has not been found 

 a single stone in any one of the samples brought home by the expedition; 

 the size of the largest particle observed, being little more than 2 nini. Most 

 of the samples, as I shall subsequently relate at greater length, are even 

 without any component larger than Va mm. Whenever we have any know- 

 ledge of the bottom-deposits in other arctic regions, we find that they, com- 

 pared with deposits from other parts of the Ocean, generally contain a greater 

 abundance of stones, including every possible transition from boulder clay 

 sediments — more especially in the region of the great sea-currents car- 

 rying ice-bergs — down to the finer sorts of clay that are found farther out 

 at the bounderies of the temperate seas, where ice-bergs play a less important 

 part. Now as this last condition was everywhere paramount in the field of 

 the Fram Expedition's researches, it has occasioned the above-mentioned 

 remarkable fineness of the particles in the samples, so that, mechanically 

 considered, these samples correspond almost exactly with those from warmer 

 seas. 



On the other hand, there is another characteristic which the deposits 

 under discussion have in common with other true arctic deposits, namely, 

 the small amount of organic particles they contain. In other arctic regions 

 this may be ascribed to two altogether different reasons; on the one hand 



