PHYSICAL OOEANOGBAPHY OP THE GULF OF MAINE 835 



enters the eastern side of the Gulf of Maine in summers of this type is not cold, but 

 actually is warmer than the water it meets within the gulf. 



This we found to be the case in July and August of 1914, when salinities and 

 temperatures showed that the cold tongue was eddying offshore toward the edge of 

 the continent, and to the left, a short distance east of the longitude of Cape Sable 

 (Bigelow, 1917), although a dominant southwesterly set of about 1 knot per horn- 

 was then recorded in the offing of Shelburne (station 10231). The observations 

 taken during the last week of July, 1915, by the Canadian Fisheries Expedition 

 (Bjerkan, 1919), corroborated by our own September stations for that year (10312, 

 10313, and 10314), again showed the coldest and least saline water as veering south- 

 ward from the offing of Shelburne toward La Have Bank — not continuing west- 

 ward to Cape Sable. 



The summer of 1922 seems also to have belonged to this category, because, as 

 Doctor Huntsman informs me, not one of the bottles that were put out to the east- 

 ward of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, during that summer has been reported from the 

 Gulf of Maine; but a series set out on a line running southwesterly for 125 miles 

 from BrazU Rock, just east of Cape Sable, on the 17th of that July, evidently coin- 

 cided with the zone of transition between the Scotian and Gulf of Maine eddies, 

 because about as many bottles from the inner end of the line were reported from 

 the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy (p. 908) as from the eastward, while more either 

 drifted inshore or remained stationary.'* 



Four others, set out near the outer edge of the continental shelf, were picked 

 up on the west coast of Nova Scotia, in the Bay of Fundy, and on the coast of 

 Maine. The latter drifts, Doctor Huntsman points out, indicate a westward ten- 

 dency along the edge of the continent and entrance into the gulf around or across 

 Browns Bank with the slope water discussed below (p. 842). Such of the bottles 

 from this line as finally drifted into the Gulf of Maine eddy traveled with consider- 

 able speed (p. 847) ; but so many of them worked slowly shoreward, and the dis- 

 persal was so nearly equal in the two directions, east and west, that the water off 

 Cape Sable is described by Doctor Huntsman as " a relatively dead zone" at the time, 

 so far as any nontidal drift is concerned. Tidal currents, however, run with great 

 velocity in this region, especially close in to land. 



A dead zone of this same sort seems again to have developed off Cape Sable 

 during the summer of 1923, when, as Doctor Huntsman writes, some bottles from a 

 line running eastward from Browns Bank toward La Have Bank (i. e., at right 

 angles to the Cape Sable line of the year previous) were finally recovered in the 

 Gulf of Maine after drifts no more rapid than those of the 1922 series, while others 

 were picked up on the other side of the Atlantic (England, Ireland, France, and the 

 Azores) a year later. The only bottle from lines east of La Have Bank, which is 

 known to have reached the Gulf of Maine during that summer, was one set adrift 

 in Cabot Strait on July 18 and picked up near Cape Sable on December 2. This 

 bottle. Doctor Huntsman suggests, may have gone out along the western side of 

 the Laurentian Channel, then westv/ard along the edge of the continent, and so 



" Doctor Huntsman kindly allows quotation of these results in advance of publication. They are discussed more fully in 

 another chapter (p. 908). 



