AMELIORATIONS OF PRESENT ARCTIC CLIMATES 385 



pressed to the surface. This is in contrast to the situations in 

 which Spitzbergen and Franz Joseph Land he. There the warm 

 currents from the south are not only permitted to spread, but the 

 opening of the connecting tract into the Polar Sea seems to require 

 this. Though these islands stand in the broad avenue through 

 which the "Gulf Stream" or the "Atlantic Drift" flows toward the 

 Polar Sea, they necessarily suffer from the spreading of the warm 

 waters over a broad surface and their consequent cooling. Though 

 these waters appreciably warm the tract traversed, the effect is 

 insufficient to maintain such a persistent hospitaUty and such pro- 

 lific Kfe as does the unique httle tract at the head of Baffin Bay. 

 This is a striking verification of one of the theoretical conclusions 

 offered in the last article.^ 



The remaining problem. — But giving to these two factors all 

 that is due them, the anomaly of a cHmatic oasis within 850 miles 

 of the North Pole and on the cold side of the oceanic thoroughfare 

 between the Atlantic and the Polar Sea is not yet adequately 

 explained. There is little ground to expect to reach any such 

 explanation without analyzing the modes of oceanic exchange 

 between the producing sources of warm water and of cold water, 

 respectively, which involves that of saline water, on the one hand, 

 and fresh water, on the other. This requires attention to the con- 

 figuration of the Polar and Atlantic basins in which the opposite 

 kinds of water are generated, as also of the intervening thorough- 

 fare through which the exchange of these waters takes place. It is 

 a step of some consequence to recognize definitely that there are two 

 dominant areas of generation and a connecting tract between them. 

 The connecting tract is often rather loosely regarded as a part of 

 the Atlantic Basin, or else as a part of the Polar Basin, but it is 

 better to regard it as neither. Functionally, it is a connecting 

 avenue defined at either end by partially submerged intercontinental 

 ridges; these ridges serve at once as dams and as weirs. Between the 

 ridge-dams and weirs at either end there is an uneven tract occupied 

 by basins, shallows, and islands. The parts of this tract that most 

 concern us in this discussion are the Norwegian and Berentz seas, 



' "A Veteran Climatic Fallacy," Jour, of GeoL, Vol. XXXI (Feb.-Mar., 1923), pp. 

 179-91- 



