Historical background; Exploration, concepts, and observations

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The first of the four main parts of this chapter presents a short history of the European discovery of circumpolar lands and the Arctic Ocean from the earliest recorded voyages to the twentieth century. The story of geographic exploration of the Arctic regions has been told many times, and there is an enormous literature dealing with expeditions and geographic discoveries. Particularly useful in providing the historical setting for the growth of scientific knowledge of the Arctic Ocean area is the compilation by Kirwan (1959), who provides insights into the economic, strategic, political, and personal motives behind many of the explorations; and the scholarly analyses edited by Rey and others (1984), which trace the development of geographic and scientific knowledge of the Arctic as a result of myths, conjectures, genuine discoveries, and increasingly precise observations from antiquity to the eighteenth century. The next part deals with the mapping of the Arctic Ocean basin and floor during the last century, from sparse information that led to a shallow, single-basin concept to the complex sea- floor morphology that gradually emerged as a result of the more detailed surveys beginning with the Soviet explorations in 1937. This section ends with a description of the major modern bathymetric maps and charts that have appeared in print, from Bartholomew in 1897 to Perry and others (Plate 1, this volume). The third section is an outline of the history of the geoscien- tific work carried out within the Arctic Ocean region, from ships, from drifting stations, and

This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit: