“EARTH’S NEW CYCLE OF WARM WEATHER.——THE CONCLUSION OF SOVIET METEOROLOGISTS.
03 Mar 1939, Fri ·Page 3
More than eighteen years of observing the fluctuations of Arctic weather conditions in the fifty-eight Soviet scientific stations in the Far North lead Russian meteorologists to a forecast of warmer winters and hotter summers for the North and South Poles.
They believe that the earth is entering a new cycle of warmer weather.
A series of curious discoveries has been announced in support of this the ory. It has been noted that year by year, for the past two decades, the fringe of the Polar ice-pack has been creeping northward in the Barents Sea. As compared with the year 19M, the total ice surface of this body of water has decreased by 20 per cent.
Various expeditions have discovered that warmth-loving species of fish have migrated in great shoals to waters farther north than they have ever been seen before. Recession of the Barents Sea icefields has been verified in recent years by numerous.
vessels of the Soviet mercantile marine plying between Murmansk and Spitzbergen,| These phenomena had at one time been attributed to a supposed swerve in the course of the Gulf stream which has brought an increased volume of warm waters to the Polar Basin. Rus‘sian scientists are now inclined to correlate the changes to the general -warming-up of the planet.
The Gulf Stream theory does not explain the rising temperatures of the waters of Baffin Bay and the Bering ‘Straits, according to Soviet experts. ‘It does not seem to account for the fact that the rivers of Northern Siberia freeze over later and thaw earlier than they did two decades ago. ‘Nor does it explain the fact that the zone of Arctic subsoil, which has been ‘rigidly frozen since the Glacial Age, is receding northward in Siberia, so ‘that at the city of Mezina it is now 40 miles farther north than it was in 1839.
There is also the unexplained phenomenon of the rise in air temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere at Bombay, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires and
Capetown.
“Our generation is living in a period when remarkable changes are taking Place almost everywhere throughout the world,’’ writes Professor L. Berg, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
‘Certainly these widely distributed phenomena cannot be due to the action of the Gulf Stream, which, however, naturally receives its share of the greater general warmth.’’_ The slow thawing of the Arctic is given as a partial explanation for the record voyages of Soviet icebreakers to northern latitudes, which have never before been reached by navigated vessels. The Sadko, in 1935, in ice-free water of the North Kara Sea, steamed to 82 degrees 42 minutes of northern latitude—an all-time record,
The Yermak, which at the opening of the century was unable to penetrate the fringe of ice-fields jamming the South Kara Sea, last year _ sailed northward in the Laptev Sea, turning back only after it had exceeded the Sadko mark by 24 nautical miles at 82 degrees 6 minutes.
The general warming of the earth seems also to account for the loosen-ings up of the huge cap of ice on the roof of the world.
This was shown in the drift of the Papanin Tee-Floe Expedition, which for nearly a year studied Arctie conditions from its preearious floating laboratory. The party of four youthful scientists in their spectacular drift from the North Pole to the Greenland Sea found that the Polar ice-pack is moving approximately twice as fast as expected from earlier observations.
Again, research buoys dropped into the Kara Sea to study Polar Sea currents indicated a movement to the coast of Greenland and Iceland two to three times more rapid than recorded movements several decades ago.
This gradual loosening of the Polar ice-pack has led such Arctic experts as Professor Vise to forecast that the ice-breaker Sedov, now adrift in the Polar ice-pack, following a course similar to, but more northerly than that of Nansen’s Fram, will be carried along much faster than the Fram, shortening the crossing of the Arctic Ocean to a little over two years.
The Fram took three years. Professor Vise believes that the Sedov, which was trapped in the ice fields north of the New Siberian Islands more than a year ago, should reach the Greenland Sea by the end of this |year, carried by the same ocean bare that bore the Papanian party.
The strange weather records of 1938 seem to fit the picture of a slowly warming earth. In England, March and December of last year were the warmest of the century during which records have been kept at Greenwich.
In December, Moscow was gripped in a protracted cold spell and temperatures fell at times to 59.8 degrees below zero, Centigrade. During the same month, Soviet scientists wintering at the observatory on Rodulf Island, 560 miles from the North Pole, reported a temperature well above the freezing point,”
