WARMER BRITAIN. 15 July 1926. “His suggestion is to build a huge jetty over the Grand Banks, a jetty about two hundred miles long, It’s heat would soon melt away a large portion of the polar ice cap, changing completely the climate of the whole of North America and also that of Northern Europe. The whole of British North America would then enjoy a climate at least as mild as that of France,” The extinction rebellion would love this.

Feb 20

WARMER BRITAIN. 15 July 1926. “His suggestion is to build a huge jetty over the Grand Banks, a jetty about two hundred miles long, It’s heat would soon melt away a large portion of the polar ice cap, changing completely the climate of the whole of North America and also that of Northern Europe. The whole of British North America would then enjoy a climate at least as mild as that of France,” The extinction rebellion would love this.

WARMER BRITAIN (1926, July 15). The Northern Miner (Charters Towers, Qld. : 1874 – 1954), p. 6. Retrieved February 19, 2020, from https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/80660839?searchTerm=antarctic%20warmer&searchLimits=#

A Roumanlan engineer, Mr. Dimitri Joanovici. declares that Britain should not take our climate lying down, says “Tit-Bits.” He has just put forward a project for damming the Fury and Hecla Straits, the narrow gap between Baffin Land and the Melville Peninsula through which the icy waters of the Arctic pour into Hudson bay, and since the Strait is only eight miles wide he thinks that it would be possible to close it completely.

The result,he believes, would be to raise the temperature of the whole of that vast inland sea called Hudson Hay.

Now it is from this bay, through Hudson Straits, that there comes the main flow of the Labrador current whjch bears immense masses of ice into the Atlantic and carries frost so far south that New York, though in the same latitude as Genoa, in Italy, has a winter almost as cold at that of Petrograd.

This Labrador Current cuts into the Gulf Stream, checking it’s flow and lowing it’s temperature, and so, of course, cooling the climate of Britain and Western Europe.

On the face of it the plan for closing the Straits sounds good, but the chances are that it will be

found impossible from an engineering point of view. The water is deep, the current strong, and the force with which the great, ice masses come crashing through it would scour out the biggest dam that man could make as easily as a bull elephant could break a thread.

There is, however, another plan for cutting of the cold water from the north. This is the proposal of Mr-. C. L. Riker, an American engineer. His suggestion is to build a huge jetty over the Grand Banks, a jetty about two hundred miles long, which would run eastwards across the shoals from a point near Cape Race, in Newfoundland.

This, he believes, would result in stopping the Labrador Current, the cold of which is equal to making two million tons of ice every second; from running right into the Gulf Stream, whose

heat is equal to the burning of two million tons of coal every minute.

At present the two currents meet on the banks where the water is only about two hundred and fifty feet deep, and one result is the immense clouds of fog which for months every year cover over a million square miles in the neighbourhood of the meeting place.

If the jetty suggested by Mr. Riker were built, the Labrador current would he returned eastwood

off the banks and would sink into the great depths of the Atlantic, where if would probably be lost, while the warm blue water of the gulf stream would continue northward in almost undiminished volumes.

It’s heat would soon melt away a large portion of the polar ice cap, changing completely the climate of the whole of North America and also that of Northern Europe.

The whole of British North America would then enjoy a climate at least as mild as that of France, while the eastern part of the United States would become as warm is Southern

California.

There might be other and even more tremendous consequences. The melting of the Arctic ice cap might shift the equalising balance of the globe so that the preponderating weight of the Antarctic ice cap would make what is now the North Pole move towards North Europe, with the result of producing a night- less summer in the area of Scotland without a dayless winter.

The cost of the great jetty is estimated at about thirty-eight million pounds. It is a lot of money, yet more was spent in one week during the war. And unlike the plan for damming the Fury and Hecla Straits the building of the jetty would offer no great engineering difficulties.