WARMER WEATHER IN THE FUTURE

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 156, 28 March 1939, Page 11

WARMER WEATHER IN THE FUTURE

Earth’s Temperature Rising THEORY OF RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS 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, states “The Observer." They believe that the earth is entering a new cycle of warmer weather. A series of curious discoveries have been announced in support of this theory. It has been noted that year by year, for the past two decades, the fringe of the Polar icepack has been creeping northward in the Barents Sea. As compared with the year 1900, the total ice surface of this body of water has decreased by 20 per cent.

Various expeditious have discovered that warmth-loving species of fish have migrated in great, shoals to waters farther north than they bad 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 Spitsbergen.

Gulf Stream Theory.

These phenomena had at one time been attributed to a supposed swerve in the course of the Gulf Stream which had brought an increased volume of warm waters to the Polar basin. Russian 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 temperature of the waters of Ballin 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 t lie 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 Cape Town. “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 ice-breakers to northern latitudes, which have never before been reached by navigating 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 even to penetrate the fringe of icefields jamming the South Kara Sea, last year sailed northward in the Laptev Sea, turning back only after it had exceeded the Sadko mark by twenty-four nautical miles at 82 degrees 6 minutes. The general warming of the earth seems also to account for the loosening up of the huge cape of ice on the roof of the world. Arctic Conditions This was shown in the drift of the Papanin Ice-Floe Expedition, which for nearly a year studied Arctic conditions from its precarious 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 that recorded movements several decades ago. This gradual loosening of the Polar ice-cap has led such Arctic experts as Professor Vise to forecast that the icebreaker Sedov, now adrift in the Polar ice-pack following a course similar to but more northerly than that of Nai:sen’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 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 in Greenwich.