Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1894 — The Wonderful Gulf Stream. [ARTICLE]

The Wonderful Gulf Stream.

People who visit the east coast of Florida, and especially the Indian River and the Lake Worth region, often wonder why the climate of that section is so delightful at all times of the year and so different in almost every particular from what one would expect in those latitudes. The explanation is simple enough. The difference between northern and semitropical Bio ida. apart from the latitudinal distance, is due to the elevation of the former and the distance from it of the Gulf stream. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico temper the immediate coast line. Their effect does not extend far inland. The stream is pressed close to the east coast shore along Dade County by the Bahama banks. Atlantic steamships southward bound, to avoid the force of the current, stand in so near the shore that they can at some points be hailed from land. The Gulf stream is an old story, but it is a great fact. This vast, deep blue river, a thousand times the volume of the Mississippi, is thirty miles wide, 2,000 feet deep, and has a velocity of five miles an hour the year round. The temperature of the stream is eighty-lour degrees, or nine degrees higher than the waters of the ocean through which it (lows. The trade winds blowing nine-tenths of the time, winter and summer from the eastward, bear the stratum of warm air formed by the Gulf stream westward across the land. This is why the east coast is milder and more equable than the west coast in the same latitude. With the Gulf stream are found three other equalizing agencies—the trade winds, the Blverglades, with a water surface preventing a land breeze, and the zone of high barometric pressure. The midsummer heat, that might otherwise be ninety-five degrees, is reduced to something like eighty-eight degrees. The midwinter chill, which might get down to thirty degrees, is warmed up to something like forty degrees.