Hansen and W. Ekman (1923) noticed that over large areas in the 

 Norwegian Sea the large scale spatial distribution of temperature 

 and salinity (density), followed closely the contour lines of the 

 bottom topography. Furthermore, when studying large scale conditions 

 in the oceans, they found a remarkable parallel between the iso- 

 therms and isohalines and the contour lines of the isobaric surfaces. 

 This important law became known as the "law of the parallel sole- 

 noids." Although this law seems very well verified in the gross 

 features of the large scale conditions, there are slight deviations 

 which are nevertheless very important. 



Precise leveling along the American East Coast shows that the 

 mean sea level increases towards the north from Florida to Nova 

 Scotia (G. Dietrich, 1937). The magnitude of this slope is ICf?, 

 and thus it is of the same order as the sea surface slopes derived 

 from data in the Caribbean Sea (H.U. Sverdrup, et al. , 1946). In 

 the Caribbean Sea, as in many other parts of the ocean, the slope 

 of the sea surface is practically compensated for by the distri- 

 bution of mass. However, this is not the case in the region of 

 the C-ulf Stream along the east coast of North America. G. Dietrich 

 (1937) has shown that along the continental slope the distribution 

 of density does not indicate any rise of the sea surface, and this 

 is true also in the case where the sea surface topography is re- 

 ferred to the 2000 dbar-surface instead of the oxygen minimum layer, 

 which was used by Dietrich (H.U. Sverdrup et al., 1946). 



With the assumption that within the layer of the wind induced 

 gradient current curl R ~ curl "*" , then from (35) 



44 



