THE ANTARCTIC QUESTION MACHAT. 465 



mum mean was sufficiently high at the end of summer, that is, on the 

 Frangais^ in February and March, 734.8 mm., and on the Belgica in 

 February, 735.7 mm. But the variations have everj'where a wide 

 lange ; more than 45 mm. on the Fixingais and 60 mm. on the Belgica. 

 The most important fact in this connection seems to be the prevalence 

 of frequent and very violent storms, with snow blizzards in all seasons, 

 and they coincide with the sudden fall of the barometer when the 

 wind blows from the north, principally in winter. Borchgrevink en- 

 countered ninety-two days of stormy weather near Victoria Land; 

 at Snow Hill the barometer recorded 708 mm. during the gale of June 

 3, 1902 ; ^ at Port Charcot M. Rey reported 722 mm. in February and 

 718 and 717 in June and August. 



During these storms, the wind blowing from the northward (north- 

 west or northeast) brings some degree of warmth; but generally 

 the cold polar breezes are most uniform throughout the Antarctic. 

 Yon Drj'galski and Borchgrevink admit the existence of a continued 

 austral anticyclone, which would remain steady near Cape Adare, 

 but along the Antarctic Continent it would be to the eastward dur- 

 ing the v^dnter, and westward in summer.^ We have thus to face con- 

 ditions different from those in the arctic regions, influenced by the 

 two cold poles near the polar circle in northeastern Siberia and on 

 the North American Archipelago. In Antarctica the area of the 

 anticyclonic south winds really expands during winter, reducing 

 its radius in the summer, due to variation in uniformity of the 

 temperature. The regions where the latest expeditions sojourned, 

 between latitude 64° and latitude 72° S., are in the zones where the 

 struggle is constant between the south breezes and those from the 

 north. At Port Charcot, for instance, over 73 per cent of the ob- 

 servations refer to concurrent southwest and northeast winds, or 

 approximate thereto. At Cape Horn, on the contrary, winds due to 

 terrestrial rotation are dominant between southwest and northwest. 

 On this side, however, there is a narrow belt of relative calm, serving 

 as a passage from the temperate to the polar zone, where the fogs are 

 much less frequent and the swell not so heavy. Over the known 

 borders of Antarctica the winds from the pole (southwest or south- 

 east) blow while the weather is clear and the barometer rises. Fre- 

 quently they are strong (more than 15 meters a second) and always 

 very cold. In exceptional cases they cause local phenomena, fochn, 

 even in midwinter. At Snow Hill, for instance, Nordenskjold veri- 

 fied a sudden rise of the temperature as high as 9.3°. At the end 

 of the summer, toward Port Charcot, they are more regular from 

 April to July (53 per cent of the July observations). On the con- 

 trary, northerly winds are always of a character strictly oceanic. 



«0. Nordenskjold: Op. cit., p. 143. 



* Zimmermau : Ann. de Geogr. 1902, p. 385. 



