Collected Papers

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: level upper limit of the cold bottom water as mapped by Murray for the region south of Alaska, let us examine its great southward extension. From off Vancouver Island to San Francisco it has risen above the 2,000 Fm. (4,000 M.) contour and lies upon the continental slope of the ocean bottom?again in...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: level upper limit of the cold bottom water as mapped by Murray for the region south of Alaska, let us examine its great southward extension. From off Vancouver Island to San Francisco it has risen above the 2,000 Fm. (4,000 M.) contour and lies upon the continental slope of the ocean bottom?again in defiance of gravity unless there is postulated a peculiar arrangement of salinity in the lower depths. HYPOTHESIS ACCOUNTING FOR COLD WATER BELT. To explain this apparently abnormal position of the cold water, let us suppose, as a working hypothesis, that the direction of ocean drift in the northeastern parts of the North Pacific is not merely true for the surface, but that it holds throughout the entire extent as far as the ocean bottom. In winter the cold surface water to the south of the Aleutian Islands would sink and at the same time be carried slowly toward the eastward. It would thus be carried over the western portion of the Maury Deep of PI. 36 and would finally rest on the continental slope. In the Alaska Bight it is conceivable that the eddy would give a constant upper level to this mass of water. To the southward along the coast of Vancouver to San Francisco, the upper drift (except very close inshore) is toward the east and south. If this drift extends to the ocean bottom, the cold bottom water would be driven up the continental slope, thus accounting for the belt of cold coast water. Again it will be remembered that the coldest coast water was found from the vicinity of Cape Blanco southward to Cape Mendocino. In Pl . 36 the contours of 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 meters make a shoreward bend slightly north of this latitude. That is, a great submarine valley heads just under Cape Blanco and opens broadly out to the northward and westward. The bottom drift on our work...