474 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 63 



factors being equal, and the nearer the Pole the lower the critical 

 altitude need be. Thus while in Colorado one may need to scale to 

 heights of 11,000 feet or beyond for characteristic Alpine, in north- 

 ern Alaska near the continental limit of trees he may find such 

 Alpine at scarcely more than 1,000 feet. The highest mountains 

 of temperate latitudes can produce some pretty fancy imitations of 

 arctic conditions, but hardly can surpass the best that the Arctic itself 

 can produce. 



From the days of the early Polar explorers, many of whom were 

 unceremoniously swallowed up by the very land they came to ex- 

 plore, man has tried to solve the riddles of the Arctic — to fathom 

 from the evolutionary pages of geological history and from the dy- 

 namics of modern-day pattern and process the conquest of life over 

 perpetual ice and snow, perennial freeze and thaw, and eternal days 

 and eternal nights. The conquest of man over this conquest of nature 

 has only begim. Every year research in the Arctic is being broadened 

 and intensified until today there is hardly a branch of science not 

 represented in the Arctic quest. 



Quite obviously the scope of my subject reaches far beyond the po- 

 tential of this paper, or of any other single paper for that matter, 

 and I shall not even attempt to cover all aspects of this topic. I will 

 talk only about the subject without meaning to synthesize and sum- 

 marize it. I will speak only of some aspects that have intrigued me 

 in the course of my own research. Greater emphasis will be placed 

 throughout on the Arctic than on the Alpine, because my own experi- 

 ence is primarily with the Arctic, and all the features concerned are 

 more accentuated in the Arctic. Much of what I say about the Arctic 

 can be applied equally though to a lesser degree to the Alpine, but the 

 applications will not always be made here, at least not explicitly. The 

 same holds for the Southern Hemisphere, about which nothing will 

 be said here. 



DEFINITIONS 



To the astronomer the Arctic is that zone surrounding the North 

 Pole, lying north of the imaginary and legendary Arctic Circle 

 (66°30' N. lat.), where on the shortest day the sun never rises and on 

 the longest day it never sets. Mention the Arctic to a cliraatologist, and 

 he thinks about low mean temperature and precipitation, early and 

 late killing frosts, and a very truncated growing season. The geologist 

 is likely to picture permanently frozen ground, soil polygons, and 

 glaciers. We must turn to the botanist to whom the Arctic is a matter 

 of vegetation, however, for a really vivid and in many ways more 

 meaningful concept of the Arctic. He is quick to point out that 

 vegetation is influenced by all the other factors and can be regarded as 

 integrating them into one total response — the vegetation type. 



