TO SHIFT THE NORTH POLE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1032, 28 November 1912, Page 4

TO SHIFT THE NORTH POLE.

BROOKLYN ENGINEER’S

PLAN

A scheme to make Siberia a summer resort, start ice famines in Labrador, give Scotland an allday summer with a temperature like Japan’s, change the climate of the Atlantic coast to one like that of Southern California, and melt all the ice on and around the North Pole, and open it to gardening, is outlined in the New York Herald (Paris edition).

It is the work of Mr C. L. Riker, a Brooklyn engineer, who estimates that it would cost AH that is needed, he states, is to build a jetty about 200 miles long across the shoals extending eastward from Newfoundland, near Cape Race, This would stop the Labrador current, whose cold is capable of making 2,000,000 tons of ice every second, from running right into the Gulf Stream, whose heat is equal to the buruiug of 2,000,000 tons of coal every minute. They meet now on the Grand Banks, where the water is only about 250 feet deep. If such a jetty were built, the Labrador current, coming down from the Arctic, would be turned eastward, and would be sunk so far when the Gulf Stream met it that the latter warm, blue river of the ocean would pass over the great cold river from the North Pole.

The warm Gulf Stream would continue iu almost uudimiuished volume to the northward, and the Labrador Current would run a mile deep through the great depths of the Atlantic, making the torrid zone about the equator cooler, while the Gulf Stream would require only three months to melt every inch of ice around the Pole.

Mr Riker is a distinguished engineer, and his scheme, fantastic as it may appear, has commanded much attention.

No more icebergs in the steamship laues, uo more of such fogs as now prevail about the meeting of the cold and vs arm currents, storms reduced to a minimum, and the whole ol Kastern North America a garden of paradise, with uo great cold or heat, are some of the results he forsees from building the jetty. Cape Hatteras, he believes, would disappear owing to the increased speed of the Gulf Stream, which he estimates would flow closer to the Jersey coast, and incidentally redeposit along the coast about 6,000,000 acres of land. The melting of the Arctic ice cap, he estimates, would shift the equalising balance of the globe, and the then prepondering weight of the Antarctic ice cap would make what is now the North Pole shift towards Northern Ivurope, with the result of producing a uightless summer in the area of Scotland without a dayless winter.