KONGL. SV. VET. AKADEMIENS HANDLINGAR. BAND 20. N:0 5. 21 



development and for others to develop so well as they would do under other circumstances. 

 Besides, on account of this long interruption in the period of vegetation, it be- 

 comes impossible for all other algaä to grow on this part of the bottom than those 

 which possess such organs of reproduction as enable them to rest, without injury, during 

 a long part of the year, exposed to a low temperature. 



The same region of the bottom, but also its deeper parts, above all the upper part of 

 the sublitoral zone, is subjected to the action of the drift-ice, when it lies still along the 

 coasts, or floats quietly along them, or is rolled on with tremendous violence by the furious 

 waves, mighty masses of ice being thrown or screwed high up on the shores, leaving the 

 bottom, where they have passed, bare and desolate. The drift-ice always exercises a friction 

 now feebler now stronger on the bottom nearest the shores, by which friction the marine 

 vegetation is decimated, masses of mud and small shingle are formed, and rocks and stones 

 are smoothed and, as it were, polished. I believe that the scarcity of algoä within the litoral 

 zone and the upper part of the sublitoral in the greater part of the Arctic Sea depends on 

 this pernicious influence of the ice. The known algologist Dickie has a priori arrived 

 at the same conclusion. In his description of a collection of algas brought together in 

 the American Arctic Sea during one of the English arctic expeditions, he says: »The 

 nuraber of litoral species in such regions must be few or in many places altogether 

 absent; the continual abrading influence of bergs and pack-ice would effectually prevent 

 their growth.»^) That difference in the distribution of the vegetation among the several 

 bottom-zones, which appears in different parts of the Arctic Sea, seems thus to be essentially 

 connected with a difference in the character of the ice, in such a manner that if the other 

 circumstances are the same, a more equal distribution of the vegetation on the sublitoral 

 and the litoral zones takes place, if the ice is more favourable. With regard to the 

 formation and drifting of ice, the Norwegian Polar Sea is most favourably situated of 

 all parts of the Arctic Sea. Ice is never formed here in greater quantities, nor does 

 the polar ice set down here. In the White Sea ice is formed during the winter, 

 but in the summer the water is free from ice. The state of the ice within the rest of 

 the Arctic Sea may be regarded as being, on the whole, pretty much the same. In the 

 eastern part of the Greenland Sea along the west coast of Spitzbergen, in the eastern 

 part of the Murman Sea, and in the eastern part of Baffin Bay, the state of the ice is 

 relatively favourable in summer, in the two first-mentioned regions in consequence of 

 the Gulf-stream, in the so-called North-Greenland on account of the westerly direction 

 of the ice-current, after it has turnecl Cape Farewell. However, even here the sea is 

 probably no year free from ice even in summer, though it is not so compact nor packed 

 on to the coasts in so large quantities as to make them inaccessible during any year. 

 The arctic expeditions of the låter years have shown that the sea off the east coast of 

 Novaya Zemlya and the north coast of Siberia is rich in ice, though near the coasts it 

 is less thick and more divided. Such is especially the case before the mouths of the 

 great Siberian rivers, where during the summer-months the main mäss of the polar ice 

 is kept from the land by currents flowing in an easterly direction, and the coast ice 



') Dickie, Alg. Sutherl. 2, p. 200. 



