Note 1418 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

Europe's location in the path of the North Atlantic westerlies, swept by winds from a small and narrow ocean which has been super-heated by the powerful Gulf Stream, secures for that continent a more equable climate and milder winters than corresponding latitudes on the western coasts of North America, whose winds from the wide Pacific are not so warm.1418 Moreover, a coastal rampart of mountains from Alaska to Mexico restricts the beneficial influences of the Pacific climate to a narrow seaboard, excludes them from the vast interior, which by reason of cold or aridity or both must forever renounce great economic or historical significance, unless its mineral resources developed unsuspected importance. In Europe, the absence of mountain barriers across the course of these westerly winds from Norway to central Spain, and the unobstructed avenue offered to them by the Mediterranean Sea during fall and winter, enable all the Atlantic's mitigating influences of warmth and moisture to penetrate inland, and temper the climate of Europe as far east as St. Petersburg and Constantinople. Thus several factors have combined to give the western half of Europe an extraordinarily favorable climate. They have therefore greatly broadened its zone of historical intensity toward the north, pushed it up to the sixtieth parallel, while the corresponding zone in eastern Asia finds its northern limit at the fortieth degree.