Reviews — Dr. Nansen's North Polar Sea. 423 



delightful works of travel and adventure in inhospitable and little- 

 known regions, and fortunately for most of us Britishers written in 

 the English language. The most recent volume here under our 

 notice deals with those great problems of submerged lands and 

 ocean basins for the most part held fast in the embrace of perennial 

 ice, and of which the depth can only be known by the sounding 

 line let down through the ice-cap itself. As well known, " Nansen's 

 Farthest North " was reached on the 7th April, 1895, in N. lat. 

 86° 13' 6", where the depth of the ocean reaches 3,000 metres, 

 a depth which may be presumed to extend to the pole itself. Certain 

 it is that deep ocean water is under the North Pole ; not " an open 

 sea," as was once announced by Kane, the American Arctic explorer. 

 The whole structure and arrangement of land and sea, whether 

 ice-covered or open, is admirably represented in the bathymetrical 

 chart of the North Polar Seas which accompanies Nansen's recent 

 volume, and under its guidance I propose to consider some of the 

 suboceanic features which arrest attention. The centre of the chart 

 being the pole, it embraces in its circumference all the region 

 bordering on both sides the Arctic circle ; and on looking at the 

 chart we are at once struck by three leading features indicated by 

 distinctive colours — the lands, by dark shade ; the continental shelf 

 or platform, by yellow ; and the deep ocean, by various shades of blue. 

 The varying depths are all worked out by isobathic lines founded 

 on the soundings, a system of suboceanic delineation hitherto much, 

 neglected by British cartographers, but capable of opening up 

 many new facts of suboceanic geography ; this, indeed, is the only 

 way of placing before us in a graphic manner the various physical 

 features below the waters of the ocean, whether they be terraces, 

 old river valleys, gulfs, or deep ocean. Of this system of illustration 

 Dr. Nansen has made abundant use both for pourtraying the form 

 of the sea-floor and for plotting transverse sections similar to those 

 which may be drawn by means of contour-lines to illustrate the 

 form of the land. 



The continental shelf is continuous all round the margin of the 

 land with the exception of one remarkable interval lying along 

 the meridian of Greenwich between Spitzbergen and the north-east 

 corner of Greenland, where the floor of the ocean bed rises to within 

 786 metres of the surface in the form of a narrow bank descending 

 rapidly into the deep water of the Arctic Ocean on the one side and 

 into that of the Norwegian Gulf on the other. It is, in fact, a sub- 

 merged saddle. The narrowest part of the continental shelf lies 

 off the Lofoten Islands, but spreads in a broad nearly level sheet all 

 round the coast of the Europe-Asian Continent to that of the North 

 American Continent. From its surface rise the Spitzbergen and Franz 

 Josef groups of islands, together with Novaia Zembla and the 

 New Siberian Islands. Its average depth near the outer margin may 

 be taken at 200 metres, but in some places it is over 300 metres. 

 All the way from Spitzbergen along the Europe-Asian Continent 

 it breaks off in a steep declivity, descending into the Arctic Ocean 

 by gradients varying from 5^ to 20 degrees in steepness; the 



