Science: Greenland Elaborated

Like a pouting lip, the promontory of Northeast Foreland juts from Greenland’s poleward face into the Arctic Ocean. Across a 300-mi. gap of ice-choked water lies the intricately indented coast of Svalbard (Spitsbergen). Down between them, on maps, runs a frizzy line enclosing a white blob which cartographers have labeled “unexplored.” Reports received in Copenhagen last week indicated the frizzy line would have to be changed. Just inside it, Dr. Lauge Koch, Danish scientist-explorer, had found a chain of mountainous islands.

Dr. Koch’s expedition, operating from the sturdy little baseship Gustav Holm, anchored just under the 80th parallel, has been exploring northern Greenland by air for two years. Two nights on the same day last week brought the total distance covered up to more than 25,000 mi. without one mishap. The other flight was westward, over the Northeast Foreland lip to Peary Land. It discovered that a mountain range beginning at a deepcut mouth, Denmark Fjord, runs out on the lip. Skimming over vast desolate plains lying between this range and the great inland mountain chain. Dr. Koch concluded that their geological histories were distinct.

Dr. Koch, 40, has been poking around in the Arctic since he was 19. He sailed with the bicentenary jubilee “North-Around-Greenland” expedition (1920-23), later commanded three government geological surveys to East Greenland, the last in 1930. For that year the American Geographical Society awarded him its Charles P. Daly gold medal.

The present expedition was Denmark’s greatest. Backed partly by private, partly by government funds. Dr. Koch steamed out of Copenhagen in June 1931 with 66 geologists, zoologists, geographers, meteorologists, cartographers, radiomen; 54 dogs, eight motorboats, tons & tons of supplies.

He left in the midst of the bloodless quarrel between Denmark and Norway over possession of the Greenland coast north of Scoresby Sound (TIME. June 8. 1931 et seq.}. Denmark—said Norway in effect, defending the rights of Norwegian hunters to settle there—had never fully explored this part of her huge colony. Dr. Koch proceeded systematically to answer that objection by proceeding north from Scoresby Sound, charting as he went.

He hoped also to find some clue to the vanishing of the aboriginal inhabitants, to investigate a reported immigration of musk oxen and white wolves from the islands north of Canada. But he was looking for whatever he could find. From the first summer’s work he took back to Copenhagen news of a coal deposit containing 50,000 tons, “superior to English coal;” after the second, he had quantities of fossil stegocephali, four-legged amphibians presumed to be evolutionary links between fish and reptiles.