338 Spencer — Improbability of Land at the North Pole. 



out the remarkable uniformity of the shelf in the Polar 

 basin. Continental shelves are characteristically narrower in 

 front of bold highlands than where they fringe low plains 

 as on the other side of the Polar basin. Apparently the ques- 

 tion of the formation of the continental shelf in one part of 

 the iVrctic cannot be separated from the rest of it. No land 

 was discerned beyond Prince Patrick's or from Sverdrup's New 

 Land. 



From the absence of land for a hundred miles, from the 

 occurrence of the sea depth at 432 feet thirty miles from land, 

 and from the characteristic of narrow shelves in front of high 

 lands, I suspect that Commander Peary passed the edge of the 

 shelf and was perhaps over the deep basin, as he would have 

 been in front of Spitzbergen. From this consideration and 

 from the feature of limitation of the continental shelves being 

 indicated by the presence of deep fjords as found among the 

 islands of the archipelago, and from the characteristics of the 

 platforms in front of high lands, I am inclined to place a theo- 

 retical limit of from 50 to 100 miles as the breadth of the 

 shelf in front of the known islands, without the expectation of 

 finding any great islands farther north. If this approximation, 

 based upon physiographic information of no mean value, be 

 correct, there would still remain a distance of 300 or 350 nau- 

 tical miles between the edge of the shelf north of Grant 

 Land and the Pole, beneath the ice of which obtains the deep 

 basin. The edge of the shelf, indicating the limit of the insular 

 extension of continental lands, wherever found, precludes the 

 probability of land beyond, rising out of a deep sea basin. 



Having found a working hypothesis from the physiographic 

 features, other phenomena in support of the hypothesis based 

 on the submarine topography have been mentioned by Dr. 

 Nansen. Along the course of the Fram, at depths of more 

 than 800-900 meters, colder heavy bottom water was found, 

 above that affected by subterranean heat, but beneath the over- 

 lying stratum of warmer water. It must have cooled down 

 somewhere in the unknown Arctic basin, in contact with the 

 cold surface water ; and this place of wide extent is somewhere 

 far from the course of the Fram, occupying probably the 

 greater part of the still unknown Polar region. Similar phe- 

 nomena exist in the Norwegian Sea, where, however, the 

 center of cold has been found. The drift of the ice under the 

 coast of Greenland is much greater than where the ice belt is 

 broader in the Polar sea. These additional phenomena further 

 preclude the idea of Polar land. 



I have not touched upon the question of possible land north 

 of Bering Straits. The position is much farther from the Pole 

 than that of the locations considered. Nor has the question of 



