THE NEXT POLAR ADVENTURE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 450, 9 February 1909, Page 3

THE NEXT POLAR ADVENTURE.

(By B. W. Norregaard)

,Captain Roald Amundsen, the leader of the famous Ojoa expedition which solved the problem of the North-West passage, has now laid before the Geographical Society in Christiania bis plans for a new Arctic expedition, his object being during a voyage lasting over five or six years to study the oceanography of the Northern Polar basis. The funds for his expedition will be raised in Norway, King Haakon and Queen Maud heading the subscription list with The ship he proposes to use is the renowned Fram, in which Nansen undertook his great journey in 1893-1896, and which is still in perfect condition. And as the new expedition will be undertaken with Nansen’s ship, so Captain Amundsen’s journey will be modelled upon the methods and founded on the experiences of his predecessor and teacher. His plan is this: With the Fram equipped for seven years and manned by picked men, he is to depart from Christiania in the beginning of 1910, setting the course for San Francisco via Cape Horn. After coaling and provisioning at San Francisco he steers straight for Point Barrow, the northernmost point of America, where he hopes to arrive in July or August. Here he dismisses all but ten of his crew, and then in a N.N.W. direction proceeds as far as possible until his ship is firmly gripped by the ice. And then the slow drifting with the ice, calculated to last for four or five years, will commence, his course after a while probably being nearly parallel to that of Nansen, only a good deal more to the north. I talked with him to-day of his plans. “My expedition,” he told me, “is not primarily geographical, nor is it my chief ambition to reach the North Pole. Of course, any laud we may come across will be explored and mapped, and the farther north the current will take ,ts the more pleased I shall be. If iE seems well within the bounds of reasonableness, I certainly shall make a dash for the North Pole, in that case leaving my ship and proceeding with an especially equipped sleighing expedition. “For hauling the sleighs I had intended to use tamed and brokenin Polar bears, these being stronger and more enduring than dogs. Several oi these animals have tor some time been in training at Hageubeck’s in Hamburg. But the process turns out to be a very slow one, requiring several years ; so it looks like their being acclimatised to warmer altitudes and unfit for Arctic life before they can get broken to their work. Although the training is being continued, I foresee I shall have to fall back on dogs alter all. “My main object, however, is an exploration of the large and deep Polar basin itself. While expeditions of former times always had the object of discovering and exploring new land, since the middle of last century several important expeditions have been equipped with the sole object of exploring the seas. The most renowned of these were the Challenger expedition under Sir Wyville Thomson and John Murray in 1872-1876, and the Norwegian Voringen expedition under Professors Mohn and Sars in 1876-1878. The Fram expedition also did splendid work in this respect. If Nansen did not actually succeed in solving all the riddles of the Polar basin, the reason is to be found in the defective oceanographic methods and instruments of that time. Building on the experience of former expeditions, and with the excellent instruments of to-day at our disposal, I trust I shall be able to clear up much that is still unknown and unaccountable to us.

“We shall explore the form and the depth of the sea. Instead of the shallow Polar sea which Nansen expected to find, his ship was taken across depths up to 4000 metres. We, taking another course, may come across still greater depths, perhaps also come to islands and larger extensions of land. The basin, we know, is bounded by comparatively steep edges, like the North Sea. “Between the edge and the land are flat banks of changing width. Noticeable is the great continental plinth to the north of Siberia, where these shallow parts have a larger extension than in practically any other part of the earth. The continental plinth to the north of America is still unexplored. Nansen believes that between North-Eastern Greenland and Spitzbergen there is an underwater ridge separating the deep parts of the North and Polar Seas. All these questions we will try to elucidate.

“But these investigations really form the smallest part of our task. “From the firm ice of the Arctic we shall have a unique opportunity, impossible to obtain from the moving deck of a ship, of studying a whole series of oceanographic problems, such as the temperature and the degree of saltness in the three different layers of water — the cold and little salt top layer of about 200 metres in depth, the warmer and salter central layer between 200 and 800 meters in depth, and the huge cold bottomwater —the systems of currents in these layers, and the hdge submarine waves on their edges which may reach dimensions of a couple of hundred metres. Further, we shall investigate the phenomena ot tidal water, the effect of the winds on the current of the sea, the amount of light at different depths under the ice and in open

water, and its influence on animal and vegetable life. Finally, we shall make meteorological and magnetic observations and study the aurora borealis.”

Captain Amundsen explained all this to me very circumstantially, but very quietly and unaffectedly, as if it were a question of taking a trip to China or to Argentina instead of burying himself for many long years in the night and the terrible cold of the Polar regions. I scan his self-reliant face, his strong, wiry frame ; I remember his courage and resourcefulness and never-tailing energy during his Gjoa expedition, his large experience and long study of the problems he will attempt to solve, and I feel confident that no better leader for the new venture could be found. I believe he will bring the Fram back loaded with material and specimens, and its cupboards stored with notes that will throw light on many questions as yet unanswered.

And I, for one, would not be in the least astonished if, on his return, he would be able to serve his guests with champagne cooled on ice taken directly from the North Pole itself.