The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1901-03-21

that it contains that the scientist Is aoie
to tell so accurately the spot in the
ocean from which 1t is dredged
Descending the plains of the sea INTO
still deeper depths, where the potion Is
from two miles to five miles below the
surface. even these shells disappear, the
delicate and fragile ones first, and there
is a vast stretch of soft red clay, cover
ing, as Murray estimates, fully hall or
the entire ocean floor. Here the shells
have fallen so far through the water
that they have been wholly dissolved,
and the deposit is made up, as the
dreGgings show, of pumice thrown up by
volcanoes, along with the products OF It's
decomposition, and of meteoric or cos
mic dust which, through ages, has. faii-
en- into the sea. Here, also, are found
considerable deposits of the ear bones
of whales and the tips of the teeth of
huge sharks, the hardest OF bones,
many of them covered with deposits or
manganese. A single dredging from the
Challenger in the central Pacific brought
up many bushels of manganese nodutes:
| 200 sharks teeth, and 500 fragments or
whales bones. What a graveyard is
this! How many thousands of centuries
lit must have taken to deposit so many
| remains of animals in one small spot!
| The fact that many of the bones were
from extinct species that lived long aso,
land that they are found mingled with
4
1slowly the bottom of the sea IS being
filed in The Challenger dredge
brought up in one haphazard sweep ma
terals that the slow ocean had teen
boarding there. perhaps, for a mllllon
years or more. Sir John Murray hopes
that some time dredge will be devised
| 70: boring into the bottom of the deep
| est sea. so that scientists may learn just
how deep the deposits really are, and
what was their nature when the oceans
were new.
In this connection. one of the most in
teresting facts established by the Chal-
ilenger expedition was the large proper
ton of the ocean in which the depths
are profound We are accustomed to
thinking of 100 fathoms $500 feeD as deep
water, but only small proportion of the
sea is of this depth or less-a thin fringe
around the Aand. about per cent of the
total sea area OF the remainder of the
ocean area. 60 per cent is deeper than
ZOO fathoms (nearly two and one-half
miles, In making his charts of the sea
floor Murray has marked no fewer than
forty-three places in various parts of the
world in which the ocean is over 5000
fathoms. or nearly three geographical
miles in depth These he calls ''deeps,
and to each he has given the name of
some famous oceanographer or naviga-
tor. Every passenger on an Atlantic
steamship passes over or nearly over
some of these awful deeps. Libbey and
Sissbee Deeps. the latter being named
for Cantaiu Sgsbee of Maine fame, are
south of Nova Scotia and east of New
York: Suhm Deep is a little farther t
: the east These are all small in area
Mares Deep, northeast of the West In
: dies, is much larger in extent. Othel
] ocean valleys are the Tuscarora Deer
/ off the coast of Japan, the Aldrich Deel
! east of New Zealand, the Ross Deep o
the Antarctic. These great deeps cove
e more than 100000 square miles of tn
:, ocean floor and of all of them the deep
n est, so far as science was informed