Chukchi Sea. Twenty-two hydrographic stations were 

 occupied north of Bering Strait in the Chukchi Sea. Seven 

 stations were taken in a north-south line from Bering Strait 

 to the edge of the pack ice found just north of 72°N. Five 

 stations were occupied over a 24-hour period while the ship 

 was drifting southeastward in the immediate vicinity of the 

 ice pack. Another eight stations along the line from the ice 

 pack into Kotzebue Sound, together with the two stations 

 between the sound and Bering Straits, complete the list of 

 stations occupied in this area. This collection of stations 

 provides the most extensive data yet obtained in this section 

 of the Chukchi Sea and provides a good network for the study 

 of the distribution of the physical properties of the sea water. 



As was the case in the Bering Sea, the over-all distri- 

 bution of temperature and salinity in the Chukchi Sea leads 

 to horizontal contour charts which are remarkably similar 

 for the various depths and for both temperature and salinity. 

 The warm, low-salinity water is found at all depths on the 

 Alaskan side of the Chukchi Sea. The isopleths of both tem- 

 perature and salinity (figs. 17 through 22) run at first in 

 a north-south direction out of Bering Strait and then bend into 

 Kotzebue Sound. The projection of Alaska at Cape Hope leads 

 to a westward trend of the isolines, followed by an eastward 

 trend north of this land projection. Thus, the isolines of both 

 temperature and salinity tend to follow the contours of the 

 coast. 



The only marked departure from the similarity between 

 the trend of the isopleths of temperature and salinity occurs 

 at station N15, where low-salinity surface water occurs in 

 conjunction with the low-temperature water found on the west- 

 ward side of the area. This region of cold, low-salinity sur- 

 face water may be explained as a pocket of melt water, blown 

 down from the ice area by the characteristic northwest winds 

 which prevailed during the period the NEREUS was in the 

 region. The similarity of station N15 to the stations occupied 

 in the ice area will be noted further in the discussion of the 

 T-S relationship. 



The vertical cross sections of the temperature and sa- 

 linity for the Chukchi Sea are shown in figures 23, 24, 31, and 

 32. The right side of section C (figs. 23 and 24) gives the 

 conditions from Bering Strait to the ice pack, while section E 

 (figs. 31 and 32) gives the conditions along a line from the 

 ice pack southeastward into Kotzebue Sound. An intrusion 

 of cold water occurs between stations N10 and Nil (fig. 23), 

 just north of Bering Strait. A similar tongue of high-salinity 

 water, well-marked at all depths, appears in figure 24. Just 



