Abstract
THE yacht Princesse Alice, with the Prince of Monaco on board, left Monaco on July 18 and arrived at Gibraltar on the evening of July 22, having been detained some hours by the pursuit of a school of Orca gladiator and the capture of one of them. The whale hunt took place within sight of the rock. Having coaled, the ship left Gibraltar on the evening of July 23, and shaped a course for the Azores. On July 24 an interesting sounding was made in lat. 36° 6′ N., long. 10° 16′ W. (Paris). The depth was 1473 metres, and the temperature of the bottom water was 9°.4 C. As this thermometer was mounted so as to be overturned by the motion of a small screw propeller, its indication was not entitled to complete confidence; but when the dredge, coming from the same depth, brought a quantity of mud which had a temperature of about 8°.75 C it was evident that the conditions as regards temperature were very different from those which obtain in the open waters of the North Atlantic. At the above depth the temperature could not be expected to be above 4°.5 C. It is evident that this sounding struck one of the main drains out of the abysmal regions of the Mediterranean, and furnishes evidence of the brining down, to use a stoker's expression, of the waters of that sea, of which a more particular description can be found in the article “Mediterranean” of the “Encyclopædia Britannica.”
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BUCHANAN, J. Hydrographical Observations on the “Princesse Alice” . Nature 66, 376 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066376a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066376a0