TOPOGRAPHY. Excepting in the Amur basin and the immediate region of the mountains the whole country slopes gently from south to north, carrying the drainage to the Arctic Ocean. Most of the Arctic coast is low and flat, and, unlike most Arctic shores, it is little intersected with hays and fiords. The only region of considerable elevation appears to he the Taimyr Peninsula. with its low mountain ranges roughly paralleling the coast. The that Arctic plain (tundra) crosses the Arctic Circle south of the mouth of the Oh River, and in the great northeastern peninsula of Asia and everywhere else merges into the swamp lands or the forests south of it. No glacial cov ering is found in Arctic Siberia, for the reason that the precipitation is too small for large year ly accumulations of snow. A peculiar feature is that the soil is perpetually frozen to great depths, the frost extending beneath the surface, near the pole of cold, east of the Lena River, to a depth of 650 feet. Intervening in this frozen soil are layers of clear blue ice, called ground ice. It is in this frozen mass that the remains of mam moths and other animals have been kept intact probably ever since the time of the great glacial epoch. The surface thaws in summer, covering the northern regions with almost impassable mud. The coast lands of the Pacific frontage, on the contrary, are fringed by high forest-clad mountain ranges approaching so near the sea that little opportunity is given for deep indentations, and there are long stretches of comparatively straight shore line. Siberia has only a few isl ands of much importance, the new Siberian group of the Arctic and the large Saghalien Island in the Pacific being most noteworthy. The sur rounding seas are very shallow, usually for a long distance from the land. South of the Arctic region the Yenisei River divides Siberia into two parts whose characteristics differ greatly. The region to the west, or nearly the whole of Western Siberia, consists of vast level plains, al most completely covered in the northwest with one of the most extensive swamp regions of the world, in which many rivers wind their slug gish and very tortuous courses. The region of
swampy lands embraces nearly all of the Gov ernment of Tobolsk and the northern part of Tomsk: and scattered through the swamp area and thickly sown over the southern plains are thousands of lakes, most of them very small. relies of the ice age. The eastern part of Tomsk belongs in its topographic aspects to East ern Siberia, which strikingly contrasts with most of the region west of the Yenisei.
.1s Western Siberia is a land of low swamps, plains, and lakes, so Eastern Siberia to the Pa cific, especially in the south, is a land of low plateaus sloping gradually to the Arctic and surmounted by many ranges of mountains, most of them not high, but giving the country a very rugged character. The ranges have a general northeast and northwest direction, following the trend of the backbone or central feature of the region—the chain known as the Yablonoi and Stanovoi mountains, which extends unbrokenly from the Chinese border east of Lake Baikal to Bering Strait, about 4300 miles. In the far north the ranges thin out and dwindle so that the great low plain of North Euro-Asia is continued prac tically without interruption to Bering Sea. The southern part of the western plains is the chief region of agriculture and population. The east ern mountains are the region of milling, with agricultural opportunities in many valleys. The highest mountains are the Altai, Sayan, Yab lonoi. and Stano•oi mountains, the culminating point, outside of Kanitchatka, being the Byel ukha, in the Katunski-Altai, which, according to a recent measurement, has an elevation of nearly 15,000 feet. The isolated mountain district of Kamtchatka reaches in numerous peaks eleva tions of from 10,000 to nearly 15,000 feet.