the hydrography of the country has given the rivers a very turbulent character, sometimes frothing their way through narrow channels, broken by whirlpools and falls, then widening out into great, ramified broads (fig. 3). Innumerable lakes, the largest of which are Baker Lake, Dubawnt and Yathkyed or Hikoligjuaq, are spread over the country, and in the depressions, where rocky or icebound soil prevents the water from soaking away, the ground is swampy and filled with bogs. In summer the contrast between these saturated depressions
Image missingFig. 3.Lower Kazan River at one of the great ice-filled lakes.
Photo taken July 1st.
and the bone-dry sand and gravel hills makes a striking difference in the vegetation. Rivers and lakes are the physiographic features which are of most importance to the diffusion of the Eskimos, the distribution of the settlements being directly dependent upon the abundance of fish in them and the places where the caribou cross them on their migrations.
Climate. Vahl has the honour of having found a formula for determining the climatic boundaries of the biochores, a formula that is logically more correct, and in practice gives better results, than the previously applied limitation by the use of isotherms. How the polar boundary will run in detail in the Barren Grounds is as yet beyond. our power to indicate;[1] but practically speaking the climate everywhere may be described as arctic. Shut off from the mild influence
- ↑ For the polar boundary the formula is: w = 9°.5 – 1/30 c, where w is the mean temperature for the warmest month, c for the coldest. (Vahl 1911; 295). Since then it has been altered by Otto Nordenskjöld (1918; 84) to w = 9º – 0.1 c.
