Fig. 315.—Map of the north polar regions, showing the area of drift ice and the tracks of the Jeannette and the Fram (compiled from various maps).
Pinning his faith to these indubitable facts, Nansen built the Fram in such a manner as to resist and elude the enormous pressures of the ice pack, stocked her with provisions sufficient for five years, and by allowing the vessel to be frozen into the pack north of the New Siberian Islands, he consigned himself and his companions to the mercy of the elements. The world knows the result as one of the most remarkable achievements in the long history of polar exploration. The track of the Fram, charted in [Fig. 315], considered in connection with that of the Jeannette, shows that the Arctic pack drifts from Bering Sea westward until near the northeastern coast of Greenland.
Special casks were for experimental purposes fastened in the ice to the north of Behring Strait by Melville and Bryant, and two of these were afterwards recovered, the one near the North Cape in northern Norway, and the other in northeastern Iceland (see map, [Fig. 315]). Peary’s trips northward in 1906 and 1909 from the vicinity of Smith Sound have indicated that between the Pole and the shores of Greenland and Grant Land the drift is throughout to the eastward, corresponding to the westerly wind. Upon this border the great area of Arctic drift ice is in contact with great continental glaciers bordered by a glacier fringe. Admiral Peary has shown that instead of consisting of frozen sea ice, the pack is here made up of great floes from 20 to 100 feet in thickness and that these have been derived from the glacier fringe.
Whenever the blizzards blow off the inland ice from the south, leads are opened at the margin of the fringe and may carry strips from the latter northward across the lead. With favorable conditions these leads may be closed by thick sea ice so that with the occurrence of counter winds from the north they do not entirely return to their original position. A continuance of this process may have resulted in the heavy floe ice to the northward of Greenland, which, acting as an obstruction, may have forced the thinner drift ice to keep on the European side of the Arctic pack.
Fig. 316.—The shelf ice of Coats Land with the surrounding pack ice showing in the foreground (after Bruce).
About the Antarctic continent there is a broad girdle of pack ice which, while more indolent in its movements than the Arctic pack, has been shown by the expeditions of the Belgica and the Pourquoi-Pas to possess the same kind of shifting movements. In the southern spring this pack floats northward and is to a large extent broken up and melted on reaching lower latitudes.
