380 THE NORTH POLAR BASIN. 



of lesser inagnitnde is legion, and it is only necessary to qnote one of 

 each as an example. 



Sixth mnonitiide (80,000 to 40,000), rniiiie. 

 Seventh iiiagnitnde (40,000 to 20,000), Rhoue. 

 Eighth niaguitndo (20,000 to 10,000), Garonne. 

 Ninth magnitude (10,000 to 5,000), Thames. 



There is nothing that makes a greater impression upon the Arctic 

 traveller than the enormous width of the rivers. The I'echora is only 

 a river of the fifth magnitude, but it is more than 1 mile wide for sev- 

 eral hundred miles of its course. The Yenisei is more than 3 miles wide 

 for at least 1,000 miles, and 1 mile wide for nearly another thousand. 

 Whymper describes tlie Yukon as varying from 1 mile to 4 nnles in 

 widtb for 300 or 400 miles of its length. The Mackenzie is described as 

 averaging 1 mile in width for more than 1,000 miles, with occasional 

 exi>ansions for long distances to twice that size. 



The drainage area does not measure the size of the Arctic rivers at 

 all adequately. Though the rainfall of nniny of them is comparatively 

 small, the size of the rivers is relatively very large, owing to the sud- 

 den melting of the winter's accumulation of snow, which causes an 

 annual Hood of great magnitude, like tlie rising of the Nile. Even on 

 the Amur in eastern Siberia and on the Yukon in Alaska the annual 

 Mood is important enough, but on the rivers which flow north into the 

 Polar Sea the dannniug up of the mouths bj^ the accunuilations of ice 

 produces an annual deluge, frequently extending over thousands of 

 square miles, — acatastrophe the effects of which have been nnich under- 

 rated and never adequately described. 



If we assume that the unknown regions are principally sea, then the 

 Polar Basin, including the area drained by all rivers Howing into the 

 Arctic Sea, may be roughly estimated to contain abyut 14,000,000 

 square miles, of which half is land and half water. In the coldest part 

 of the basin the land is either glacier or tundra, and in the warmer 

 parts it is either forest or steppe. 



GREENLAND GLACIERS. 



Greenland, the home of the glacier and the ^lother of the icebergs of 

 the Northern Atlantic, rises 9,000 or 10,000 feet above sea level, whilst 

 the sea between that lofty plateau and Scandinavia is the deepest 

 known in the Polar Basin, though it is separated from the rest of the 

 Atlantic by a broad belt or submarine plateau connecting Greenland 

 across Iceland and the Faroes with the British islands and Europe. 

 Iceland, Spitzbergen, and Novaya-Zemlia, the latter a continuation of 

 the Urals, are all mountainous and full of glaciers. The glaciers of 

 southern Alaska are some of the largest in the world. The glaciers 

 and the icebergs have a literature of their own, and we must j)ass them 

 by to say a word or two about the tundra. 



