102 HOBBS— CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [April 22, 



Nansen encountered one of these foehn winds on his descent, 

 and Peary mentions their occurrence in the north. In Scoresby's 

 Land on the east coast, a foehn wind in the winter season has been 

 known in a single hour to change the temperature by 24° C. (or 43° 

 F.), and the maximum change during such a wind is far greater. 

 It would not appear from observations that the winds of the Green- 

 land system extend to any great distance above the surface, where 

 the broad cyclonic areas in the atmosphere may be presumed to con- 

 tinue their courses with but slight modification. The anti-cyclone 

 of the continent is, however, none the less clear and constant and is 

 centered over the high interior. Nansen has remarked the calms 

 over the divide of his section."- 



There is some evidence that in adopting the important modern 

 laws of adiabatic cooling of the air, we have allowed the pendulum 

 to swing too far and have given too little weight to the effect of 

 cooling through contact of air with either rock or snow. The latest 

 results of Antarctic expeditions furnish the most striking proof of 

 this, if other than Greenland examples were needed, and the Antarc- 

 tic studies throw much light upon the conditions of snow distribu- 

 tion which are observed in Greenland. 



W'i)id Transportation of Snoiv Over the Desert of Inland-ice. — 

 Whymper and Nordenskiold called Greenland a " Northern Sahara." 

 In different ways Nansen and Peary have each instituted compar- 

 isons between the wastes of snow in the interior of Greenland and 

 the desert of sand of the Sahara. The Norwegian explorer has 

 emphasized especially the wide daily ranges of temperature, which 

 because of generally cloudless atmospheres, both deserts have in 

 common. Of the monotonous and elemental simplicity of the snow 

 vistas back from the ice margin in North Greenland, Peary says 'J^ 



It is an Arctic Sahara, in comparison with which the African Sahara is 

 insignificant. For on this frozen Sahara of inner Greenland occurs no form 

 of life, animal or vegetable; no fragment of rock, no grain of sand is 

 visible. The traveller across its frozen wastes, travelling as I have week 

 after week, sees outside himself and his own party but three things in all 

 the world, namely, the infinite expanse of the frozen plain, the infinite dome 

 of the cold blue sky, and the cold white sun — nothing but these (see Fig. 30). 



"Nansen, /. c, Vol. 2, pp. 487-488, 496. 

 ''^ Geogr. Journ., I. c, pp. 214, 215. 



