The Bennington banner. [volume] (Bennington, Vt.) 1858-1894, 1894-02-23
OLD EARTH DIVEsTED OF WATER.
The Beds of the Ocean and Their Peculiar
Formations,

The Beds of the Ocean and Their Peculiar
Formations,
If we could survey our globe Invested Of
the vast volume of ice and water that COZ
ers so much of its surface, it would be al.
most like beholding another world. 1t
would be wonder to see the great depres-
sions, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the cir
cumpolar valleys, and we should be
brought face to face with many new and
pulling problems. Innumerable islands
would be resolved to mountain tops, and
singular plateaus, many Of them thousands
of feet high, we would recognize as one
time islands not high above water line.
1t is the water surface that is now de-
termining the earth's mean level, and if
this were gone it would be hard to estab-
lish grade to calculate from All our ups
and downs have reference to altitude or
depth with reference to the ocean surface.
What immense valleys would lie between
New York and London, between San Fran
cisco and Chinal What mountain and
valley systems would be disclosed in re-
gions that now lie under waterl What
revelations concerning fauna and fora
would the now submerged rocks disclose,
and what skeletons of a former world
would the arctic regions reveal!
But the interesting problem which we
may consider, and one that as yet is elud-
ing solution, is how and by what agencies
were the great marine valleys scooped out?
What was it that followed out their ba-
sins, and especially by what action was
the North Polar sea eXcavated with its rim
'of continents extending all around?
Greenland, North America, Asia and
Europe all butt up against this polar ocean,
It's antipodes is in midocean, but the mea-
ger sunlight and consequently absent solar
caloric have evoked the development Of
the immense ice cap, much the most CO.
lossal structure of the kind on the planet
But the south Pacific ocean, were the
water absent, would present most singu-
lar looking craters, and which as they now
just emerge little above low tide we rec
ognize as the huge astolls the work of
the coral insect. 1t is more than proba bic
that some OF the puzzling crater formations
on the moon are similar work fashioned
when our lunar satellite had oceans on her
surface as we now see on our earth. The
thousands of miles of coral reefs and the
numerous coral archipelagoes that dot the
aqueous hemisphere under tropical and
semltropical skies would be almost insolu-
BILE problems did we not understand the
conditions under which they were pro-
duced.
Much that is mysterious on our lunar
neighbor can be measurably comprehend
ed if we can succeed in seeing our earth
as if Invested of her watery envelope, and
If we can still further succeed in compre-
hending the conditions under which our
oceans would disappear, if they disappear
at all, we would probably have the key
that would unlock each lunar mystery
1t is to the water and the ice that we
owe the soil and the generally smooth con-
tour of the earth, and we find where these
agencies have been at work barren, rocky
and broken condition, well illustrated by
the wild Yosemite and other rugged can
yons of the west.-Pittsburg Dispatch.