The Geographical Journal (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society): Volume XII, No. 2 [‎288r] (78/154)

PROPOSAL FOR AN EXPEDITION TO SANNIKOFF LAND.
165
-to contain, besides the basalts, beds of lignite, which may be considered with great
probability as a continuation of the tertiary lignite beds of New Siberia which
appear under the same longitude, and are known as the “ Wood mountains.” The
similarity of structure between New Siberia and Bennet island is thus evident, and
it is permissible to suppose that Sannikoff Land and Bennet island represent only
parts of a trap region having a certain extension.
2. De Long found on Bennet island the antlers of a reindeer, about which he
was not certain whether they belonged to a recent or to a fossil individual. In the
first case, we could admit either that Bennet island has such a climate as permits
reindeer to sojourn there—which would naturally seem highly improbable—or we
-should be bound to admit that the antlers belonged to an animal which came from
New Siberia, and would have been killed in the island, which also seems to me a
rather forced explanation. But if these antlers were fossil, then the other con
temporaries of the reindeer, the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the musk-ox, etc., whose
xemains are so characteristic of the New Siberia islands, must also have lived in
Bennet island. We should then expect to find in Bennet island and Sannikoff
Land the same geological features as in New Siberia. Further, we should then
have to conclude that the coast-line of the Post-pliocene Siberian continent not
only included the New Siberia islands—which has been firmly established by the
two last expeditions of the Academy of Science—but that this old coast-line must
be traced still further northwards. How far this old continent—which, like New
Siberia, is now broken into an archipelago—stretched northwards, and whether it
ended at the spot where Nansen found, in 79° N. lat. and 140° E. long., a depth
of 1050 feet, or whether it stretched further to the north and the north-east of the
course of the Fram, is precisely a most interesting geographical question.
3. One of the results of Nansen’s Fram expedition is the highly important
fact that the drift of the Fram was not a continuation of the drift of the Jeannette,
but, although both had the same origin, the latter was to the north of the former.*
What is there producing this bifurcation of the current ? I cannot answer this
question otherwise than by the supposition that there are lands lying in the north
of the New Siberia islands, which lands need not stretch, of course, as far as the pole,
but must have a sufficient size to produce the said bifurcation of the current.
4. In the drift course of the Fram, as well as along the route followed by
Nansen and Johansen, it appeared that floating ice always drifted with a greater
facility northwards, while it was mostly blocked when it was pushed south-east
wards—that is, in the direction of the archipelago which I suspect to exist.
If these considerations relative to the probable extension of Sannikoff Land
and its belonging to an undiscovered archipelago be true, the whole matter is, of
course, only about such masses of land as may have the size of Franz Josef’s Land,
but hardly the size of Spitsbergen or Greenland. But even if the archipelago con
sisted only of Bennei island and Sannikoff Land, the urgency, from a scientific
point of view, of an exploration of these two islands would not he smaller than if we
expected there the presence of larger extensions of land.
I will mention briefly the scientific aims of an expedition to Sannikoff
Land.
It would be needless to bring further proof for the assertion that such an expe
dition, made with a ship, would have to solve a series of oceanographic problems,
of which the first would be the investigation of the dependence, so unexpectedly
found by Nansen, of the Atlantic ocean on the polar basin.
The topographical and geographical questions which the expedition would have
* Cf. also A. Supan,“Die Norwegische Polarexpedition, 1893-96,” in Petermanns
Mitteiluugen, Band, xliii., 1897, pp. 130 seq.