PERILS OF POLAR ICE CURRENTS

Southland Times, Issue 23374, 4 December 1937, Page 7

PERILS OF POLAR ICE CURRENTS

SOVIET SCIENTISTS BELIEVED SAFE CAMP ON DRIFTING FLOE LONDON, December 2. Although the four Russian Polar observers, camped on an icefloe, are in the grip of a Polar current and are drifting just as Nansen’s Fram did 40 years ago, towards the Spitzbergen coast, Moscow is not anxious about the party. It is expected that the scientists will be removed from the floe before March, April or May, according to the conditions.

The scientists’ fate was becoming a matter of serious concern. Messages coming through with unfailing regularity showed that they had drifted 100 miles from their starting point, staggering from east to west as the winds and ice pressures dictated. The drifting ice-fields were surveyed from the air by Amundsen, Sir Hubert Wilkins, and others, but no explorers had previously entrusted themselves to the tender mercies of the irresistible ice stream.

Escape for the Russians would be all but miraculous in the tumbled mass of grinding floes that sweeps down the wild coast of East Greenland.

The Russians are in the depth of the Arctic winter night, lit only by the moon, the stars, and the aurora. They are probably meeting conditions similar to those of the crew of the Fram, whose master, Captain Sverdrup, wrote: “The ice round us roared, screamed and trembled as if a tremendous gale were blowing.” The Riga correspondent of The Times says that the observers report their position as being latitude 32 degrees 30min north longitude and 6 degrees east, which is roughly over 500 miles from the Pole. They are drifting towards Prince Christian Land, the north-eastern extremity of Greenland, and expect to drift south parallel with the coast of Greenalnd. They hope conditions will allow them to remain until May 21, when they will have completed a year on the floe. The scientists say that the triangular floe on which they are camped is over two miles long, even after the recent split, and that one-tenth of the size would be enough. They are regularly measuring the depths, taking the temperatures, sampling the water and taking electric, magnetic and other observations. The depth of the ocean for several months had remained more or less constant at two miles.