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The National Geographic Magazine 



very old, the sea seeming to have no 

 broad outlet through which the ice can 

 escape, as it does north of Siberia. The 

 openings to the east are long and rather 

 narrow channels. This does not argue 

 against a tolerably broad expanse of 

 water extending westward; for, the cur- 

 rents setting eastward prevent the ice 

 from escaping to the west. It seems 

 probable that land, continuous or nearly 

 so, must extend far westward from off 

 Banks Land ; for, this supposed land 

 and the eastward currents might well 

 explain why it is that the ice never re- 

 cedes far northward from the northern 

 coast of Alaska nor westward from 

 Banks Land. 



Osborn thus speaks of the ice en- 

 countered by McClure in Beaufort Sea : 

 ' ' Ice of stupendous thickness and in 

 extensive floes, some seven or eight 

 miles in extent, was seen on either hand ; 

 the surface of it not flat, such as we see 

 in Baffins Strait and the adjacent seas, 

 but rugged with the accumulated snow, 

 frost, and thaws of centuries." * 



Such are the arguments for the ex- 

 istence of a tract of land extending from 

 near the northwest corner of Banks 

 Land, or from Prince Patrick Island, to 

 a point north of New Siberia, based 

 upon the drifting of the ice on the one 

 hand and upon its age and compara- 

 tively slight movement on the other 

 hand. 



Let us next consider what are the in- 

 dications from the tides. In the first 

 place, the tide at Point Barrow is semi- 

 diurnal in character, with a mean range 

 of 0.4 foot, the flood coming from the 

 west. This can not come through Bering 

 Strait, because the tide immediately 

 south of the strait has scarcely i-foot 

 range, with a large diurnal inequality, 

 and at a short distance north of the 

 strait, at Pitlekaj, where the Vega win- 

 tered in 1 878-' 79, the range of the semi- 

 diurnal tide was carefully measured and 

 found to be only 0.2 foot. Whence 



* McClure: L. c, p. 83. 



comes the Point Barrow tide? It can 

 not come from the north or east, because 

 all observers agree that the flood comes 

 from the west, and that it is high water 

 on the western side of the point con- 

 siderably earlier than on the eastern.* 

 De Long's party made careful observa- 

 tions upon the tide at Bennett Island, 

 and these show a range of 2 feet. Such 

 a range, diminished by the broadening 

 of the shallow sea to the east of this 

 island, might well be reduced to that 

 found at Point Barrow, provided one 

 considers that the range generally di- 

 minishes off headlands and capes. On 

 the other hand, if no land exists north 

 of Point Barrow, how can the tide there 

 be much less than that found at Bennett 

 Island, and how can the flood come from 

 the west? For, practically all of the 

 Arctic Ocean tide is derived from the 

 Atlantic, chiefly through the Greenland 

 Sea, and without land near the Pole one 

 of these stations would be reached about 

 as well as the other. 



The reasons for not drawing the 

 boundary straight from the Bennett 

 Island corner to the Banks Land corner, 

 but deflecting it to the south, are, first, 

 the apparent necessity for such a bend 

 in order that the direction of the flood 

 may better accord with observation, and 

 that the times of the tides of northern 

 Alaska may be consistent with those at 

 Bennett Island, and, second, the small 

 north-and-south movement of the ice 

 north of Alaska indicating that the sea 

 is here probably narrower than it is 

 farther west, or north of Siberia. 



In the extreme north this land can 

 not extend much beyond the Pole to- 

 ward Franz Josef Land, because this 

 would undoubtedly have there caused a 

 bend in the track of the Fram' s drift. 



* Thomas Simpson : Discoveries on the North 

 Coast of America, 1836-1839, pp. 161, 162, 167. 



Accounts and Papers, Navy, vol. 42 (1854), 

 p. 162. 



Lieut. P. H. Ray : Report of the Interna- 

 tional Polar Expedition to Point Barrow, 

 Alaska, p. 678. 



