AN ENGINEER’S DREAM.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 14, 15 January 1913, Page 3

AN ENGINEER’S DREAM.

A scheme to make Siberia a summer resort, start ice famines in Labrador, ‘give Scotland an all-day summer with a temperateure 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 anil open it to gardening, is outlined in the ‘New York Herald.’ It is the work of Mr. C. L. Riker, a Brooklyn engineer, who estimates that it would cost £38,000,000. All that is needed, he stated, is to build a jetty about twenty miles long across the shoals extending eastward from Newfoundland, near Cape Race. This would stop the Labrador current from running right into the Gulf Stream. If such a jetty were built, the Labrador current, coming down from the Arctic, would be turned eastward, and would be sunk sp 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 in almost undiminishcd volume to the northward, and the Labrador current would run a mile deep through the great depths to 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 said to be a distinguished engineer, but surely his scheme is a wild, fantastic dream.