THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 9 



its lowest. There is never a time when one can travel on foot or 

 by dog sledge over the ice without meeting this handicap of open 

 water, and open water is more serious than the deepest masses of 

 the softest snow or the most craggy and slippery ice ridges. 



All this being so, the North Pole might still be at the center 

 of this floating conglomeration of ice. So it would were it not 

 for a fundamental difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific 

 oceans. In each of these there is a great stream of warm water 

 rushing northward. In the Atlantic we call it the Gulf Stream and 

 in the Pacific we speak of the Japan Current. The two oceans 

 differ fundamentally, however, in that, no matter how hard it tries, 

 the Japan Current is unable to penetrate to the polar sea in its 

 quarter. It is fenced out by the chain of the Aleutian Islands and 

 by Bering Strait, where Alaska and Siberia almost lock horns. 

 The Strait is thirty-six miles across, scarcely wider than the chan- 

 nel between Great Britain and France, and besides being narrow 

 and shallow it has two islands in the middle. The Japan Current, 

 therefore, instead of reaching the Alaskan arctic with its warmth, 

 spends its heat upon the air and water of the North Pacific, with 

 only a little and practically imperceptible amount of slightly warmed 

 water finding its way to the north coast of Alaska. 



In the Atlantic the condition is different. The waters warmed 

 by the Gulf Stream spread northward through the wide and deep 

 gap between Norway and Greenland, splitting on Iceland with 

 such effect that although Iceland is arctic in name and subarctic in 

 latitude it is temperate in weather. The climate of Iceland at sea 

 level does not differ materially from that of Scotland. There are 

 high mountains and these are ice-capped. It is a commonplace of 

 geology that the Scotch mountains would also be ice-capped were 

 they as high as those of Iceland. At sea level in Iceland the temper- 

 ature in some winters never falls to zero Fahrenheit, and fifteen 

 below is more often experienced in the region near New York City 

 than in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. For the last ten years 

 the mean temperature of January in Reykjavik has been thirty- 

 three degrees above zero, or about that of Milan in Italy. Nor does 

 the Gulf Stream stop at Iceland. Its waters creep north into the 

 polar ocean and melt away the ice that otherwise would be there, 

 so that the Scotch whalers in an ordinary season can sail from six 

 to seven hundred miles closer to the Pole on the Atlantic side than 

 the American whalers on the Pacific side. 



There is another place where a ship can steam about as close 

 to the Pole as it can through the breach made by the Gulf Stream. 



