THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 133 



and he tells us that he found Crustacea and in general all small 

 animal life rare when you get far within the ice.* Without mini- 

 mizing the great wealth of knowledge brought back to us by the 

 Fram at the end of her first voyage, I would provisionally in my 

 reasoning assume that Nansen's failure to find animal life in great 

 abundance was due not to its actual absence so much as to its 

 presence having escaped his observation. 



That animal life in the ocean is extraordinarily abundant on 

 the edges of the ice-covered area I have said is well known. It is 

 equally well known that there are great currents that sweep into 

 the Arctic and under the ice to take the place of the water that 

 flows south in the form of cold currents. It is asserted that fish 

 do not take kindly to the ice covering over the sea at high lati- 

 tudes. The polar ocean is generally several miles in depth, and 

 what difference should it make to a fish though there be numerous 

 pieces of ice floating on top? When the presence of ice on such 

 lakes as Winnipeg, Bear or Baikal does not appear to interfere with 

 the happiness of the fish that live in them, then why should we 

 assume that it does in the ocean? You can scarcely think of 

 scum or dust so thin on top of a basin of water as not to be 

 proportionately thicker than five or ten or even fifteen feet of 

 sea ice on top of fifteen thousand feet of ocean water. 



But even if all the fishes were to turn tail and swim south when 

 they came to the edge of the ice, there would still remain the tre- 

 mendous quantity of plankton or floating life which without voli- 

 tion of its own is carried north under the ice with every movement 

 of the upper two or three hundred fathoms of the sea surface 

 (any life deeper than that would be unreachable by seals). Nan- 

 sen's own theory of drifting across the polar basin, which was so 

 triumphantly vindicated by the Fram, postulates that any object 

 found at one edge of the icy area this year will have drifted 

 across and will be found at the other edge two or three or five 

 years from now. If the given object drifts across, evidently the 

 water in which it 'floats has also been drifting across and in that 

 water at the beginning of the voyage were living myriads of float- 

 ing plants and animals. 



Why is it logical to assume that these will all have died and 

 disappeared before a particular cubic unit of water in question 

 gets into even the center of the inaccessible area? Even were it 

 to die and disappear when the center of the inaccessible area is 



*See article by F. Nansen in Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica; title "Polar Regions." 



