56 



to the size and extent of the flat ice both as it tends to prevent the 

 bergs from working in shoreward while they are drifting southward 

 past the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland, and secondly, 

 because of the prevailing westerly gales which in early season exert 

 a tremendous driving force on the fields, within such packs of which 

 the bergs are more or less bound to be caught and deviated. We 

 confidently reiterate a statement made a year or more ago, "The 

 iceberg menace to steamships in the North Atlantic would be greatly 

 diminished or practically disappear, if sea ice did not hamper the 

 Labrador and Newfoundland shelves from February to April every 

 year." The bergs arriving as they characteristically do between 

 the Bank and the Cap, are borne southward on the northern edge 

 of the Gulf Stream and thenceforth their history is quite consistently 

 to drift off to the northeast, paralleling the steamer tracks and 

 rapidly disintegrating. 



Field ice during March was present nearly all the time with its 

 main mass hugging closely to the northeastern sector of the Bank as 

 bounded between the 50 and 100 fathom contours. No field ice, it is 

 worth mentioning, was found inshore of the 50-fathom curve, thus 

 leaving the water over the Banks quite open the entire month. 

 This is decidedly less field ice than usual, for in normal years, during 

 this period, the flat ice spreads out to a considerable area over the 

 Newfoundland shelf. The fields on the eastern side were continually 

 being blown offshore by the prevailing westerlies and just as con- 

 stantly were they being melted as they drifted out into the deep 

 water off the shelf. Many reports on the seaward side of this ice 

 mentioned the presence of growlers scattered here and there over a 

 considerable frontage. The growlers evidently were nothing more 

 than those parts of the Arctic pans which had become rafted and 

 frozen together, and being of a mass bulkier than the flat ice was 

 able to survive it by a matter of days only. Some of the flat ice 

 succeeded in drifting southward to an extreme point as noted on 

 March 23 in latitude 43° 45', longitude 48° 07'. Summarizing for 

 the month, we estimate that there were a total of 15 separate and 

 distinct bergs south of the forty-eighth parallel during the period, 

 and this is about one-half the number of bergs that usually drift 

 south during the month of March. The field ice was confined to 

 the northern part of the Banks, along the edge of the slope, and driven 

 southward by the winds to the southerly position as noted on the 

 23d instant. The amount this year is considered below that present* 

 in a normal year, but more than prevailed in either 1924 or 1925. 



APRIL 



The reports for the month of April began to come in on the second 

 day when a berg was sighted by a ship well to the eastward of the 



