Polar current

Definition and stakes

Portrait of Matthew Fontaine Maury Matthew Fontaine Maury,  Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology (1864)

“ The polar calms and the return current.—Entering the polar regions obliquely, it is pressed upon by similar particles flowing in oblique currents across every meridian; and here again is a calm place or node; for, as our imaginary particle approaches the parallels near the polar calms more and more obliquely, it, with all the rest, is whirled about the pole in a continued circular gale; finally, reaching the vortex of the calm place, it is carried upward to the regions above, whence it commences again its flow to the north as an upper current, as far as the calm belt of Capricorn ”
Source: Wikisource

Victor L. Conrad,  Popular Science Monthly (1876)

“ The two currents above referred to—the polar and the equatorial or tropical—are of different temperatures, and move horizontally in opposite directions toward each other. When they meet they overlap each other somewhat like two wedges with their sharp ends forward. The warmer current, being lighter, glides obliquely over the cooler current, and moves northward; and the cooler current, being heavier, moves beneath it on the surface of the earth southward, just as two currents, warm and cold, flow over each other in opposite directions through an open window or door of a heated room. ”
Source: Wikisource

Portrait of Joseph Larmor Joseph Larmor,  1911 Encyclopædia Britannica (1911)

“ The usual definition of the component current in any direction, as the net amount of electrons which crosses, towards the positive side, an element of surface fixed in space at right angles to that direction, per unit area per unit time, here gives no definite result. The establishment and convection of a single polar atom constitutes in fact a quasi-magnetization, in addition to the polarization current as above defined, the negative poles completing the current circuits of the positive ones. ”
Source: Wikisource

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