Banks off Newfoundland was far from satisfactory, and it -was only last 

 year that the bottom contour of Davis Strait was adequately surveyed. 



South Atlantic topography is made especially interesting by the 

 longitudinal furrows in the east and west sides, along which bottom 

 water from the Antarctic drifts northward. The recent work of the 

 "Meteor" was the first to yield an approximately correct picture of 

 these troughs and of the intervening ridge. The unexpected irregula3^- 

 ities which her sonic soundings brought to light on her several pro- 

 files of the South Atlantic show the need of lines run much closer 

 together in latitude than has yet been attempted. 



It is when we turn to the Pacific, however, that we most clearly 

 appreciate the vast amount of sounding that still remains to be done. 

 In this ocean it is only directly along the cable routes from Cali- 

 fornia to Hawaii and to Alaska; in the general vicinity of Japan; 

 along one profile from America to Australia; one from Hawaii to the 

 East Indies, and on the lines rTin within the past year by the Car- 

 negie (details not yet available) that the contours have been even 

 approximately developed for the open basin. Elsewhere we see areas, 

 greater in extent than most European principalities, marked only by 

 soundings far apart along the lines of the few deep-sea expeditions, 

 or scattered here and there. Thus, an area off lower California, 

 fully twice as large as the Republic of Mexico still remains unmarked 

 by a single sounding. Another terra incognita extending northward 

 from the foot of the Hawaiian slope nearly to the Aleutian Chain, and 

 westward to the Japan deep, i.e., 2/3 of the way across the Pacific, 

 (larger than the whole of continental United States) is crossed from 

 east to west by only one line of soundings, along which the individual 

 measurements of depths are hundreds of miles apart. 



The case is as bad in the high latitudes of the South Pacific and 

 Antarctic, with an area of nearly 3,000,000 sq. miles to the southeast 

 of Chile in which (up to 1927) only eight soundings had ever been 

 taken. To the southward of the Jeffrey trough, south of Australia, 

 and right down to the Antarctic edge, we again find only odd soundings, 

 while other vast blanks still remain to be explored in the southern 

 ]Bart of the Indian Ocean, 



A major problem in this connection is whether the floor of the 

 Pacific is systematically furrowed on a grand scale, as suggested by 

 at least one bathymetric map, and how it compares with the floors of 

 the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Arctic Oceans in this respect. 



About six thousand soundings had been taken in the different 

 oceans in depths greater than 1000 fathoms, up to 1912, an average of 

 only one sounding for every 33,000 square miles for all the oceans 

 combined; one sounding for every 7,000 square miles for the Atlantic. 

 And while a considerable number of deep soundings have since been 

 obtained, notably in the South Atlantic by the "Meteor," and in the 

 Northern Pacific by United States and Japanese vessels, the avers.ge 

 area for each deep sounding, the oceans over, still roughly equals 

 half the area of the state of Pennsylvania, or more than the area of 

 Denmark, It may be of interest to note, in passing, that the most 

 recent pilot charts of the U. S. Hydrographic Office list no less than 

 127 shoals in the Atlantic, 68 in the Indian Ocean, and 221 in the 



