4. The Study of the Oceanography of Australian Waters in General. — 

 At present very little data are available for the Australian section of the 

 area to the north of the Continent. Work could be most easily carried 

 out from a deep-sea vessel based at Darwin and working between North- 

 west Cape in Western Australia and Brisbane in Queensland. This work 

 should preferably be integrated into an overall programme for the Timor, 

 Arafura, Java and Banda Seas by international agreement. A fully- 

 equipped vessel, containing both biological and chemical laboratories, 

 would be needed to do the work. 



GREAT BRITAIN 



By G. E. R. Deacon, Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington,. 



Middlesex 



N. A. Mackintosh and H. F. P. Herdman published a paper, " Distri- 

 bution of the Pack-ice in the Southern Ocean," Discovery Reports, 

 Vol. 19, pp. 285-296, Cambridge, 1940, in which they give the mean 

 position of the northern edge of the ice based on all the observations 

 made by the Discovery Committee's ships, whale-factories, and other 

 expeditions. They discuss the advance and retreat of the northern 

 boundary of the pack-ice, and give a rough idea of the latitude in which 

 the ice-edge is likely to be found in any particular month. 



N. A. Mackintosh has published " The iVntarctic Convergence and 

 the Distribution of Surface Temperatures in Antarctic Waters," Dis- 

 covery Reports, Vol. 23, pp. 177-212, Cambridge, 1946. He tabulates 

 all the crossings of the Antarctic convergence by the Discovery Com- 

 mittee's ships and uses all the continuous thermograph records to construct 

 charts of the surface isotherms in the Southern Ocean for each month. 

 They give a more realistic picture of the temperature distribution than 

 could be obtained by averaging the surface temperature observations 

 made in each 1° or 5° square, and show how the isotherms crowd 

 together near the Antarctic convergence. It is foimd that the great 

 majority of the crossings of the convergence fall within 75 miles of the 

 mean position. 



H. F. P. Herdman has published " Soundings Taken During the 

 Discovery Investigations, 1932-39," Discovery Reports, Vol. 25, pp. 39- 

 106, Cambridge, 1948. He gives a new bottom chart of the Ross Sea, 

 questions the existence of a submarine connection between New Zealand 

 and Macquarie Island, and gives new information about the bottom 

 topography near the Balleny Islands. He gives a brief summary of a 

 large number of profiles obtained in the neighbourhood of the South 

 Shetland Islands. It is noted that the echoes are always weak in the 

 neighbourhood of the Antarctic convergence ; two possible causes are 

 mentioned : the mixing of the water masses in the boundary region, 

 and the presence of a very soft deposit of diatom ooze. 



G. E. R. Deacon, in a paper on " Water Circulation and Surface 

 Boundaries in the Oceans," Quarterly J. R. Met. Soc., Vol. 71, pp. 11-25, 

 1945, has emphasized the importance of the Antarctic convergence as a 

 biogeographical boundary and has shown how the stratification of the 

 bottom oozes in the boundary regions between red clay, globigerina 

 ooze, diatom ooze, and glacial sediments can be used to obtain information 

 about the interrelated decrease in the flow of the Antarctic surface and 

 bottom currents since the Glacial Period. 



146 



