98 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 70 



on the whole a well marked tendency to the displacement of the 

 anomalies from decade to decade. In single years, as for example 

 in the year 1910, there came in the second and third decade a nega- 

 tive anomaly which spread out over a greater part of the investi- 

 gated region .and then suddenly ceased. In the fifth decade, more- 

 over, there appeared a well-marked positive anomaly in the same 

 region. Such a variation can scarcely be brought about by the trans- 

 portation of cold water unless it should be a wandering minimum of 

 very short period, and it must therefore probably depend upon 

 other influences which rule only in the second and third decade. 

 In the year 1905, for example, there was from the first to the third 

 decade a well-marked positive anomaly over a greater part of the 

 region which, however, ceased in the fourth and fifth decades, when 

 negative anomalies occurred over nearly the whole region. Here 

 also it cannot have been a transportation of warm water in the 

 first decades which ceased immediately after, for in this case this 

 warm water must in all events have appeared in the later decades 

 also. Of course it might have been that the current was more or 

 less at right angles to the investigated region and the period o'f time 

 that the water was passing was so short that all the warm water 

 passed by between the third and fifth decade. But "such an assump- 

 tion is not very probable. 



POSSIBLE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRANSFERENCE OF WATER-MASSES 



BY OCEAN CURRENTS WITH RESPECT TO TEMPERATURE 



VARIATIONS 



A possible indication of the fact that some of the variations may 

 really depend upon the transference of water-masses of different 

 temperature is found by comparison of the dififerent temperature 

 curves for the different 10° longitude fields in the southwest cor- 

 ner of the Portugal-Azores region and northeasterly toward the 

 most easterly field of the route Channel to New York. In figure 

 47 are superposed, first, the mean of the temperature curves for 

 the two most southwesterly 10° longitude fields in the Portugal- 

 Azores region, that is to say, the fields between 37° and 39° north 

 latitude and between 20° and 40° west longitude ; second, in the 

 same way the mean of the temperature curves for the two more 

 northerly lying 10° longitude fields between 39° and 41° north lati- 

 tude and between 20° and 40° west longitude. Besides these are 

 also collected the temperature curves for each of the two most 

 northerly fields of the Portugal-Azores region between 20° and 30° 



