stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-009

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5

first would correspond (on a far greater scale) to the man who first climbed
Mont Blanc. We have evidence of this, not only in the firm general idea which
still holds, but also in the definite utterances of those who were engaged in
the race. Especially is this clear in the titles of their books, as Nansen's
"Farthest North", Peary's "Nearest the Pole."

Both the participants in the game of Arctic explorations and the
spectators who watched it through newspapers and books knew about the Gulf Stream
and the warm north Atlantic drift. They knew that these and other influences
make Reykjavik, Iceland, a little as warmer on the average in January than as Milan,
X Italy and that Christmas night on the north coast of Norway, eight hundred miles north
X of Scotland, is warmer on the average than at Minneapolis which is farther south
than the middle of France. They knew, but did not realize, that these and
similar causes prevented the possibility that the North Pole could be anywhere
near the center of whatever icy area there might be in the Arctic. They had the
data for calculating (if it had occured to them to do so) that the North Pole
is about four hundred miles from the center of the floating ice that troubles
Arctic navigators.

In recent years many have come to realize that the struggle to
X attain the North Pole was based on a misapprehension. since the pole The North Pole cannot correspond in difficulty to the top of a mountain, for it is nowhere
near the center of the inaccessible area (which center is called the Pole of
Inaccessibility and lies near 84° N. Latitude and 160° W. Longitude, about four
hundred miles away from the North Pole in the direction towards Alaska). But that
is by no means the most important misconception we are rid of. We have come to
realize that on the lowlands in the Arctic, both in North America and Asia, mid-
X summer temperatures are sometimes as high as at the south tip of Florida (plus
85° F. to plus 95° F. in the shade and even hotter). We know that the snowfall
in the Arctic averages less than in Scotland and that all the snow of winter
disappears in summer from every arctic land except those that are mountainous -

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