210 



POLAR PROBLEMS 



immaterial whether the Arctic was at the center of the inhabited 

 lands or not. But now that fact has suddenly become important 

 through the development of flying. 



If conditions of air navigation are favorable, or even tolerable, the 

 importance of the Arctic as a flying crossroads will steadily increase 

 as commercial cities develop farther and farther north in Siberia and 

 Canada, making the undeveloped polar center of the world ever smaller 

 and smaller. But even now Arctic routes are important, as shown by 

 the following table contrasting the mileage of transarctic air lines 

 between certain centers with the mileage by steamer and rail as now 

 in ordinary use. 



Comparative Table of Shortest Distances Between Places in 



THE Northern Hemisphere by Steamship-and-Railroad 



Routes and by Air 



Distances in Statute Miles 



Resources of the Sea 



However we define the Arctic the larger part of the inscribed area 

 is water. Some of this, in the North Atlantic, is never covered by 

 ice; some, like a portion of Bering Sea, has ice in winter but none in 

 summer; some, like the waters between the Mackenzie and Banks 

 Island, has moving ice every winter and is wath&ut ice for a while 

 most summers. And then there is the "inaccessible" area in the 

 center of the Arctic Sea, which is covered with floating ice at all 

 seasons in quantity that prevents navigation by ordinary ships. 



Fisheries (in the Elizabethan sense, which includes even whales) 

 are immemorially the chief resource of the sea. Floating ice may be 

 either their friend or enemy. It is friendly in that the quantity of 

 animal life in the ocean per cubic unit of volume increases towards 

 the Arctic and Antarctic,^ until it is very great when you come to 

 the ice frontier. Our chief food fishes, the cod, haddock, herring, and 

 halibut, have northerly ranges. 



1 Sir John Murray: The Ocean: A General Account of the Science of the Sea (in series: Home 

 University Library of Modern Knowledge, No. 76), New York and London, [1913?], pp. 162-164. 



