Note 1450 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

The two cold belts have little claim to the name of cultural zones, since their inability to support more than an insignificant population has made them almost a negligible factor in history. [Compare maps pages 8, 9, and 612.] The discoveries and settlements of the Northmen in Greenland remained a barren historical event, though the vikings' ships reached a new hemisphere. Iceland is the only land in this sub-arctic region which ever figured upon the stage of history; and its rôle was essentially passive. Such prominence as it acquired was due to its island nature and its situation in a swirl of the Gulf Stream, which ameliorates the worst climatic effects of its far northern location, and brings it just within the upper limit of the temperate belt. The wide sub-arctic lowlands of Russia and Siberia, which, from the Ural Mountains to the lower Amur River, stretch the cold zone well below the sixtieth parallel, have at times in the last three centuries and especially in the past decade thrown their great mass into the scale of eastern Asiatic history. This has been possible because the hot summer characteristic of continental climates forces the July isotherm of 20°C. northward over the vast heated surface of Asia nearly to the sixtieth parallel, well within the borders of Siberia. It gives that belt the short but warm growing season with protracted hours of sunshine which is so favorable to cereals, lending to Omsk, Tomsk, Vitimsk and all the stretch of Russian settlements in Siberia, an admirable summer climate like that of the Canadian Northwest.1450