nearest land, about two hundred miles. The temperature of the sea at two hundred and eighty, and one hundred and fifty fathoms, was 39°.8, and at the surface 39°.5. The specific gravity of water taken from those depths, and at the surface, was 1.0277 at 41°.
Sept. 18.South-easterly winds with more moderate weather prevailed between the 16th and 18th; so that by noon of that day we were in latitude 55° 40′ S., and longitude 63° 8′ W., having approached within fifty miles of Staten Island, and one hundred and forty of Cape Horn, yet we had no soundings with three hundred fathoms, and the temperature at that depth was found to be 37°.2, the surface being 40°.2. There appears to me no other way of accounting for this extraordinary depression of temperature, except by a current of water from the colder regions of the south running along the east shore of Tierra del Fuego, similar to that which I have already described as running from the Cape of Good Hope along the western coast of Africa[1], or possibly the proximity of a snow-covered land might be the cause of the sea being so much below the temperature due to that depth; for in the same latitude, and only two hundred and fifty miles to the eastward, when beyond the baneful influence of the land, we found the mean temperature of 39°.5 throughout the whole depth of our experiment, to one thousand fathoms.
- ↑ [[../../Volume 1/Chapter 2#34|Vol. I. p. 34.]]
