Daily Kennebec journal., 1894-02-03
OLD EARTH DWEsTED 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 divcsted OF
the vast v.:>ume Ct ice and water that COW
ers so much of it's 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
puzzling problems. Innumerable islands
would be resolved to mountain tops, ana
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 ISoan level, and II
this were gone it would De hard to estab-
l;sh n graoe 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 China! What mountain and
valley systems would be disclosed in re-
gions that now lie under water! What
revelations concerning fauna and flora
would the now submerged rocks disclose,
and what skeletons of a former world
would tie 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 ont?
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 rica-
ger sunHghtanG consequently absent solar
caloric have evoked the development of
the immense ice cap. much the most CO.
lcssal 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 a little above low tide we rec
oqnize as the huge astolls the work Of
the coral insect. 1t is more than probable
that some of the puzzling crater formations
ca the moon are a similar work fashioned
when our lunar satellite had oceans ON her
surface as we now see on our Garth. The
thousands of miles OF coral reefs and the
numerous coral archipelagoes that dot the
aqueous hemisphere under tropical and
scnitropical skies would be almost insolu-
bic problems did we not understand the
conditions under which they were pre-
duced.
Much that is mysterious on our lunar
neighbcr can be ineasurably comprehend
cd If we can succeed in seeing cur earth
as if divested of her watery envelope, and
IL we can still further succeed in compre-
! hendiug 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 haze been at work q barren, rocky
and broken condition. well illustrated by
| the wild Yosemite and other ragged can
/ ycns of the west.-Pittsburg Dispatch.