Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/90

62 storm-find in the wide ocean can out-top that which rages along the Atlantic coasts of North America. The China seas and the North Pacific may vie in the fury of their gales with this part of the Atlantic, but Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope cannot equal them, certainly, in frequency, nor do I believe in fury.

169. Northern seas more boisterous than southern.—In the ex-tropical regions of the south we lack those contrasts which the mountains, the deserts, the plains, the continents, and the seas of the north afford for the production of atmospherical disturbances. Neither have we in the southern seas such contrasts of hot and cold currents. The flow of warm water towards the pole, and of polar water towards the equator, is as great—perhaps if measured according to volume, is greater in the southern hemisphere. But in the southern hemisphere the currents are broad and sluggish; in the northern, narrow, sharp, and strong. Then we have in the north other climatic contrasts for which we may search southern seas in vain. Hence, without further investigation, we may infer southern seas to be less boisterous than northern.

170. Storms in the North Atlantic and Pacific.—By a like reasoning we may judge the North Pacific to be less boisterous than the North Atlantic; for, though we have continental climates on either side of each, and a Gulf Stream in both, yet the Pacific is a very much wider sea, and its Gulf Stream is (§ 54) not so warm, nor so sharp, nor so rapid; therefore the broad Pacific does not, on the whole, present the elements of atmospherical disturbance in that compactness which is so striking in the narrow North Atlantic.

171. Storms along their western shores.—Nevertheless, though the North Pacific generally may not be so stormy as the North Atlantic, we have reason to believe that meteorological agents of nearly equal power are clustered along the western shores of each ocean. Though the Gulf Stream of the Pacific is not so hot, nor the cool littoral currents so cold, as those of our ocean are, yet they lave the shores of a broader continent, and hug them quite as closely as ours do. Moreover, the Japan Current, with its neighbouring seas, is some 500 miles nearer to the pole of maximum cold than the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic is. Great prominence in the brewing of storms is to be given to the latent heat which is set free in the air when vapour is condensed into rain. The North Pacific being broader than the North Atlantic,