THE OCEAN FLOOR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 125, 28 May 1932, Page 9 (Supplement)

THE OCEAN FLOOR.

PERFECT EXAMPLE OF FINALITY. COLD, LIFELESS, FINISHED.

"The bottom of the ocean is the most perfect example on earth of finality," said Dr. Harden F. Taylor, before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia recently. "It is a vast undulating plain, dark as night, cold, lifeless, finished."

Dr. Taylor pictures the bottom of the sea as a mass of "sedimentary remains of tiny organisms of silica, iron and calcium mixed with sediments and precipitated insoluble matters, pumice stone and volcanic dust, which, in the course of time, are compressed to dense rock."

The floor of the ocean is strewn with meteorites, glacial rocks, fossilised bones and teeth of ancient animals and old shells. As these shells, teeth and bones lie for centuries they become slowly encrusted with deposits of manganese oxide, iron and a most surprising assortment of elements, some of which have never been reported from either sea water or from living things in the water. Theso nodules or lumps are of two principal kinds, manganese and phosphatic.

Manganese-iron oxides occur widely in marine deposits as minute grains which act as colouring matter in nearly all deep-sea clays. In certain abyssmal regions they form concretions around fossils, fragments of rock or coral, and

may look like marbles, potatoes or cricket balls. The indications are that these elements are derived from volcanic matter. Beads of magnetic iron, of meteoric origin, often alloyed with cobalt and nickel, have beeji separated from bottom deposits by means of a magnet. Spherules of glauconite, amorphous silicate of iron and potassium are abundant in sediments of land origin, appearing as casts of shells of small organisms, the shells themselves having dissolved away after these casts were moulded inside. Small, round nodules have been trawled from about 075 fathoms off Colombo, in the Indian Ocean, containing 75 per cent barium sulphate. The little that we know of the tiny shelled foramenifera indicates some interesting chemistry of composition.