Licking Valley courier., 1917-09-13
OssiI Oceans Of Great Ace.

ossil Oceans Of Great Age,
Among the many unsolved
mysteries concerning the interior
of mother earth few are more
fascinating than those brought to
lightNby certain surprising eXpe-
riences of drillers of deep wells.
Although many people are not
aware of the fact, a large pre-
portion of the wells sunk to
depths below 1000 feet encoun-
ter large bodies Of salt water,
the flow Of which may be so
great that the driller remarks
that he has struck the Gulf of
Mexico or some other immense
body of salt water. The salt wa
ter may even flow up out of the
mouth of the well, but more COM
monty it rises in the well to a
height of several hundred feet
above the bottom, and its supply
is so great that only a pump Of
enormous capacity can keep the.
well EMPTY. Where does this
Rtwater come from? 1t is of
shmed that it fills some i'm
hse cavity or system Of crew
es, but in fact it is generally
Contained in some bed of unusu-
ally porous rock, like sandstone,
in which the pores, though mi
mute, have an aggregate volume
or capacity of millions of cubic
feet.
But one question is no sooner
answered than another, more
difficult, arises, and the question
now is, How did this salt water
get into the porous rock? Has
rain water soaked far down in
the earth and found some bed of
rock salt which it dissolved and
thereby became salty; or has the
salt water some source far with
in the earth, from which it has
arisen toward the surface; or is
it the water of some ancient
ocean that filled the pores of the
sand and mud of its bed, which in
ages gone by became buried un-
der sand and mud that gradual
ly accumulated on the ocean bot
tom? The shells of sea animals
found in limestones and other
hard rock at the heart of the con-
tinent show clearly that the
ocean, in some one or several re-
mote ages, covered a large part |
OF the country, and it appears
extremely probable that the salt |
water found Dis is really
fossil sea water entombed in the |
sands and muds of former cons !
and now brought to the surface
by the drill, which in innumer-
able places in this and other
countries is being sunk to depths
of two, three, and four thousand
feet, and even down to depths of
nearly $500 feet, a depth reach
ed by a very deep well which is
still being drilled at place a lit
tie west of Pittsburgh.
This salt water seems to be
found especially in oil fields, but
it has been struck by the drill at
many other places, as, for exam
pie, near Leavenworth, Kans.,
where enormous quantities of
salt water are found at various
depths below the surface. Al
though no valuable pools of oil
or gas have been found in that
region, numerous beds of coal
underlie it. In one boring four
beds of coal aggregating over 8
feet in thickness and numerous
thinner beds having an addition
al total thickness of 6 feet were
found. In that region also many
Outcropping layers of rock con-
lain remains of marine shells,
and the entire region was no
doubt once covered by the sea.
Indeed, the geologist has been
able to decipher in the rocks nu-
merous details of the record of
the advance and retreat of the
sea and has been able to estab-
lish the fact that the region was
submerged at several different
times.