stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-010

6

and most of the arctic lands are low. We know there are many hundreds species
of flowering plants in the region formerly supposed to be covered by eternal ice
and that there is more eternal ice in Mexico than there is in an equal area of
arctic and subarctic continental Canada. We know that bees and butterflies go about among the
midsummer flowers on the northe coasts of the most northerly lands in the world.

But we might have in our minds all this and more of the new knowledge
about the Arctic and still the realization of the hopes of the Middle Ages about
a short route to the Far East might be as remote as ever. The climate is not
eternally cold, for the summers are warm; the lands are not eternally ice-covered,
for few of them are mountainous; the sea is not covered with one vast expanse
X of ice, for the ice is not strong enough to standl the strain of even moderate []wind, and is broken,
X over in mid-winter and summer alike, into millions of floes of varying sizes drifting about and
jostling each other, with large patches of open water between them. All these
things are true and still it remains equally true that for ordinary ships the
Arctic is not a navigable ocean on the direct route from Europe to the Pacific.

But there lies above the partly ice-filled water the wide unjhampered
ocean of the air, free to be navigated in every direction by ships of the air.

The most optimistic students consider that flying conditions over
the Arctic throughout the year are on the average better than over the north
Atlantic. The most pessimistic consider them probably worse, but conquerable.
Those who hold a middle ground think that the Arctic is perhaps more favorable
than the Atlantic in summer but that it would be less favorable in winter.. Some
of the highest authorities have said that January flying across the Arctic will
probably turn out to be not only easier than north Atlantic flying in January but
actually easier than arctic flying in July. The authorities differ partly because
some think only of our flying technique as it is to-day. But there is likely to
be as much progress in aviation during the next five years as there has been
during the past five, and many of the difficulties of to-day will be conquered