Connecticut western news., 1920-08-19
MOUNTAIN IN SEA
Summit Known as Laura Ethel Is
 the Highest.
Twenty Thousand Feet Above the Lowest Level of the Atlantic Basin Approximate Location Of
 "Davy Jones' Locker"

At the captains table on an Atlantic liner young woman idly inquired how far the ship was from the. nearest land. Several passengers would have said Offhand, About eight hundred miles," But the captain turned the question over to a quiet gentleman who looked at his watch and at a chart and amazed his hearers by answering, "Just about seventy yards"
 ''The land I speak of is just thirty six fathoms beneath this ship" con- tinued the expert oceanographer. "It is the summit of the Laura Ethel mountain, which is 10000 feet above the lowest level of the Atlantic basin. If 1t were some two hundred feet high CT, or the sea were two hundred feet lower, you would call 1t an island.
 In effect, the Atlantic is a huge con- ttnent boosting a superficial area of 25,O0O,O00 square miles. It is 5000 miles long and 2,700 miles broad. The depth of the water that covers it Is by no means so considerable as people used to imagine. Oceanography as a science may be said to date only from about 1850, but-thanks chiefly to the labors of the cable-laying and cable-repairing shfps-our knowledge of the configuration of the bed of the ocean grows greater every year.
 The Laura Ethel mountain, discover ed in 1878, is the uppermost peak of one of the most celebrated of the sub n.gv@ AlA aw A4 v-A4 Mount Chaucer, at the eastward of it, was revealed to oceanographers in 1850. Sainthill, which Is westward of both, has the honor to be the first mountain discovered in the Atlantic. It became known in 1882.
 Prior to the laying of the first At lantic cable Lieutenant Maury, United States navy, made it known that a. wide plateau exists beneath the ocean, running from Ireland to Newfound land. It seemed so admirably suited to the purpose of cable laying that he modestly called 1t Photographic plateau, but in most charts 1t bears the discov- er's name.
 The location of "Davy Jones' Lock- CT" might be said to have been estab- lished with the discovery Of Sainthill. It has been estimated that at the base of this eminence the relics of not few CT than seven thousand wrecks lie scattered. Or one might ascribe that grewsome distinction to the Faraday hills, discovered in 1888 and lying be- tween Mount Chaucer and Laura Ethel mountain. These hills are noted among oceanographers for the amount of wreckage of which they are the monument.
 There are cavernous depths, of cU1rse, in the Atlantic, as we'll as ma hStic heights. Four miles and half may be taken to be the greatest. The average is probably about two miles. Heights and depths alike are merely hidden hand, which may some day be exposed by the mighty workings of na- ture.
 Meantime. comparatively few changes occur. Beneath the ocean there are no frosts, no lightnings, no glaciers, no me neurological agents at work. If 1t were not for the eddies and the destruction and accumulation of animal life, these Atlantic hills and vales might rest as immutable as the peaks and craters of the moon, where there Is no atnoS- phere to cause decay.