AMELIORATIONS OF PRESENT ARCTIC CLIMATES 377 



situation and its position on the west side of the Atlantic drift are 

 compared with the sea-girt situations of Spitzbergen and Franz 

 Joseph Land in practically the same latitude on the warm side of 

 the Atlantic drift. These islands have no permanent human 

 inhabitants. 



South of the land of the Arctic Highlanders and separated from 

 it by an inhospitable tract of two hundred miles, the dreaded Mel- 

 ville Bay, lies a coastal belt of relative mildness occupied by the 

 Danish Colony of West Greenland. While this lies mainly between 

 63° and 73° N. Lat., scattered settlements reach nearly to the 

 southern point of Greenland, and a single settlement of Eskimos, 

 Angmagssalik, is more or less permanently maintained on the south- 

 east coast. Though this is itself quite isolated, it seems, in a sense, 

 to connect the West Greenland Colony with the settlements on 

 Iceland. The real effect of this feeble connection, however, is 

 rather to relate the climate of Iceland to the climatic mildness in 

 Bafhn Bay than to suggest that the latter is a normal part of influ- 

 ences referable to the " Gulf Stream." The district occupied by the 

 Danish Colony of Greenland is a true factor in the singular climatic 

 amelioration on the east coast of Baffin Bay, and will be treated as 

 the more southerly and larger twin of the little oasis at the head of 

 the bay. It is not, however, milder than some other tracts of its 

 own latitude. While the mildness of both these tracts is very 

 notable for their situation and latitude, it is to be understood that 

 these are Arctic climates and much more severe than those singularly 

 genial climates implied by the fossils of several geologic stages. 



THE SIGNIFICANT FEATURES OF THE GENERAL SITUATION 



The most remarkable feature of these districts of climatic 

 amelioration is that they lie northward from the northwest angle 

 of the Atlantic Ocean and reach within 1 2° of the North Pole. It is 

 especially to be noted that they are not in the great oceanic sweep 

 of the warm Atlantic drift into the Polar Sea. They bear the aspect 

 of offshoots or outliers from the coldest corner of the Atlantic. This 

 is emphasized by the further fact that between them and the main 

 warm Atlantic drift there runs the greatest of the Arctic outlets, 

 carrying southward a compact stream of ice-floes from the border 



