Polar regions

“ The Polar regions offer much to the scientist, and, in some phases, much to the artist. The beautiful Aurora flashes over the scene and banishes the darkness of the Arctic night. The vastness of Nature’s operations are shown in the huge icebergs clad in dazzling whiteness or glittering in the moon’s silvery rays in the interminable fields of fixed or floating ice, in glacial rivers of grandest size. ”

“ In contrast to the tropical regions, where the sun is always vertically overhead at some place at noon on two days (at the north and south limits on one day) every year, and always reaches in every part an altitude exceeding about 43 degrees, in the Polar Regions the sun is never more than 231⁄2 degrees above the horizon. On account of this great obliquity of the sun's rays in the Polar Regions the sun has less heating power and the regions are colder, while in winter intense cold prevails because of the entire absence of the sun. ”

“ This being so, it is clear that it is of great importance to the geographer to know exactly the distribution of land and water over the surface of the earth. As the North Polar regions are still inadequately known, and the South Polar regions hardly known at all, we cannot as yet determine exactly this distribution, but any globe will show that land and ocean are very unequally distributed. The great land masses cluster round the North Pole, while the southern hemisphere consists largely of water. ”

“ We should remember that the Pole is probably covered with sea, radiation from which is considerably less than from large land surfaces, such as the plains of North Asia. The polar region [36] has, therefore, in all probability a marine climate with comparatively mild winters, but, by way of a set-off, with cold summers.
“The cold in these regions cannot, then, be any direct obstacle. One difficulty, however, which many former expeditions have had to contend against, and which must not be overlooked here, is scurvy. ”

“ I am staring myself blind at one single point—am thinking solely of reaching the Pole and forcing our way through to the Atlantic Ocean. And all the time our real task is to explore the unknown polar regions. Are we doing nothing in the service of science? It will be a goodly collection of observations that we shall take home with us from this region, with which we are now rather too well acquainted. ”

“ It has been a fashion to speak of the Polar regions as characterised by light and darkness of six months each; but this statement is only roughly true. The Pole is merely a point and all the inhabitants of the original ancient Home, if there was one near the North Pole, could not have lived precisely at this single point. We must, therefore, distinguish between the characterestics of the Polar region and those of the circum-polar region.
THE POLAR CHARACTERESTICS.
(1) The Sun rises in the South. (2) The stars do not rise and set ”

“ The long nights of the Polar regions are not like those of more Southern latitudes. They are sometimes so clear, that one may read the smallest print. What with the coruscations of the aurora borealis, and the cheerful gleaming of the Northern constellations, one may travel without difficulty throughout the livelong night. ”

“ One thing is perfectly clear, and that is that there is an immense field for most interesting exploration of the most useful kind open to those who wish to explore in the South Polar Regions. There is no form of exploration more fascinating and more important than oceanography—physical and biological—in any part of the world, and in no region is it more interesting and important to carry on these investigations than in the seas round about the South Pole. Interesting as is the exploration of Antarctic lands, the exploration of Antarctic seas is not less so. ”

“ Antarctic Land discoveries preceding the year 1910
The polar regions, like any other part of the globe, may be said to be paved with facts, the essence of which it is necessary to acquire before knowledge of this special zone can be brought to even a provisional exactitude. On the face of it, polar research may seem to be specific and discriminating, but it must be remembered that an advance in any one of the departments into which, for convenience, science is artificially divided, conduces to the advantage of all. Science is a homogeneous whole. ”

“ If we regard, for instance, the polar current—that broad current which flows down from the unknown polar regions between Spitzbergen and Greenland—and consider what an enormous mass of water it carries along, it must seem self-evident that this cannot come from a circumscribed and small basin, but must needs be gathered from distant sources, the more so as the Polar Sea (so far as we know it) is remarkably shallow everywhere to the north of the European, Asiatic, and American coasts. ”

“ But however variable the conditions of the ice may be, the impediments, even under the most favourable circumstances, are so very great, that we have never been able to penetrate the innermost Polar regions,—penetrate, that is, to where, according to the views of an earlier time, the open Polar Sea should be found. ”

“ Everything is on a reduced scale here in the Polar regions; we can't afford to be extravagant. ”

“ We know still less of the vegetation of the interior of Madagascar, Borneo, New Guinea, and the greater part of Australia. To conclude: we are probably not acquainted with more than one-fifth of the vegetable species which cover the surface of our globe.
There are regions, moreover, which we imagine will always lie outside of our sphere of investigation; such, for instance, are the Polar regions, properly so called. Undoubtedly, it is open to us to conjecture that the Poles—those two extremities of our axis of planetary rotation—are not the home of any form of life. ”

“ General interest thus re-aroused in Arctic exploration brought about a united effort of all the civilised nations to investigate the conditions of the Polar regions. An international Polar Conference was held at Hamburg in 1879, at which it was determined to surround the North Pole for the years 1882-83 by stations of scientific observation, intended to study the conditions of the Polar Ocean. No less than fifteen expeditions were sent forth, some to the Antarctic regions, but most of them round the North Pole. ”

“ The earth’s north pole is now inclined directly away from the sun and its rays have entirely forsaken the Arctic for the Antarctic zone; notwithstanding the earth’s daily rotation, which brings alternating light and darkness to the greater part of the world, the northern polar regions are in a continuous shadow, and no sunlight reaches these remote parts. ”

“ From this it will be seen that sea ice especially, and even the surface of glacier ice is swarming with life, and is by no means so sterile as it is usually thought to be. Bacteriological examination has demonstrated that the air of the Polar Regions is sterile, but under natural conditions in the Polar Regions, as in other regions, we may lay down a general law, and say—Where there is water there is life! ”

“ A marked variation, which has an important bearing not only on climate, but on the distribution of life encountered in passing from equatorial to polar regions, is found in the distribution of light. Between the tropics the number of hours of light and darkness each day is approximately equal; in the temperate zone there is considerable diversity from season to season, which increases with increase in latitude ”

“ The regions of Northern Europe and Northern America, notwithstanding their original opposition to man, are to-day the most fruitful of all lands in industrial discoveries and intellectual activities, but in the polar regions, as in the equatorial, the highest development never can be reached. ”

“ Through inherited qualities and long usage they are so inured to their wretched condition that to a degree they do not realize its discomforts; but steadily advancing agencies are approaching their lands, and at a not very remote period their present inhabitants will have disappeared, and for the same reason that Ento's polar regions are, I may say, well populated, ere long Earth's polar regions will sustain a large number of inhabitants. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the polar regions were principally water, while the tropics were occupied with a belt of land, there would be no part of the earth’s surface on which the frost could fasten a firm hold, while the torrid zone would act like a furnace to heat the whole. ”

“ It is very important to get a proper grip of these facts if one is to have a proper conception of where the Polar Regions are, and to account for various special phenomena peculiar to these two parts of the earth. ”

“ The hour of the day at the pole is a paradoxical conception, for that point is the meeting place of every meridian, and the time of all holds good, so that it is always any hour one cares to mention. Unpunctuality is hence impossible—but the question grows complex, and its practical solution concerns few.
No one needs to go to the pole to discover all that makes that point different from any other point of the surface. But the whole polar regions are full of unknown things, which every Arctic explorer of the right stamp looks forward to finding. ”

“ To make it seem probable, we have only to establish two essential points that will not be seriously contested by any geologist. One is, that the polar regions, which were covered with large trees, enjoyed a climate more temperate than that of Central Europe, and were habitable and fertile to the eightieth degree, underwent a slow and progressive cooling down till the middle of the Tertiary period. ”

“ It was, therefore, in the polar regions that life first became possible, and here the life of the Silurian age arose. There is evidence of a continent in Jurassic and Tertiary (Miocene) times where now there is a polar ocean of great depth, save where Spitsbergen and Franz Josef Land exist as the sole remaining fragments of that continent. There is evidence that forests once flourished where now nothing higher than the dwarf willow can exist. ”

“ The reason is not far to seek, for to the depth of a fathom or so the sea becomes frozen solidly during the winter, and when summer comes and the pack breaks up, this and even heavier ice is driven along the shore and grinds over the rocks, rubbing and polishing them and preventing seaweed from growing there. Naturally also, for the same reason, one need not expect to find shore animals, and, as a matter of fact, shore fauna is very scanty in the Polar Regions. ”

“ The temperate zones, at a more or less distant period, will not be more habitable than the polar regions now are. Then the population of men, as well as the animals, will flow towards the latitudes which are more directly under the solar influence. ”

“ The general advancement in the knowledge of our globe, which follows the work of polar exploration, is not at first perceived. The collective results are rearranged and interwoven with the other threads which go to make up the fabric of the various branches of natural science. Around the two poles of the earth, and particularly around the south pole, there are extensive unknown [454] regions. In these regions are hidden the finishing filaments of much exact knowledge. To seek these is the true object of polar exploration. ”

“ If we take a terrestrial globe, and examine the actual region near the North Pole which has as yet remained unvisited by man, it will be found to be far smaller than many imagine. In nearly all maps the requirements99 of charting result in a considerable exaggeration of the polar regions. This is the case in the ordinary ‘maps of the two hemispheres’ which are to be found in all atlases. And it is, of course, the case to a much more remarkable extent in what is termed Mercator’s projection. ”

“ The sun’s power being greatest between the tropics, the heat sinks deeper there than elsewhere, and the depth gradually diminishes towards the poles; but the heat is also transmitted laterally from the warmer to the colder strata north and south of the equator, and aids in tempering the severity of the polar regions. ”

“ These Whale Sound Eskimos could be of great value in antarctic work, but there are probably not more than four men living who have experience to use them.
The whole animus of the polar regions is against machinery, and those regions are the last places in the world in which to try out or develop an untried device. Even devices which work satisfactorily in temperate regions are more than likely to fall down when called upon to perform under the handicap of polar conditions. ”

“ But from my experience in the Polar Regions during twenty years I cannot conceive of these Antarctic bergs being built up from a base of sea ice.
There appears to be little doubt, however, that the Ross Barrier is to a great extent afloat. But Sir George Darwin's "guess" "that the bay behind the barrier stretches past the South Pole and to the east of it as far as latitude 80°" is dangerous. All the evidence at our disposal from observations taken in the region of the Weddell Sea condemns the idea that there is "an arm of the sea through to Weddell's Sea." ”

“ From what has been already stated it appears that the animal and vegetable relics found in the Polar regions, imbedded in strata deposited in widely separated geological eras, uniformly testify that a warm climate has in former times prevailed over the whole globe. From palaeontological science no support can be obtained for the assumption of a periodical alternation of warm and cold climates on the surface of the earth. ”