GEOLOGICAL THEORIES

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 149, 21 March 1927, Page 3

GEOLOGICAL THEORIES

ADDRESS BY DR. WILLIS That there was some force beneath the Pacific which was making the continents and mountains was a theory advanced by Dr. Bailey Willis, Professor of Geology to the Stanford University, in an address to the Wellington Philosophical Society. Dr. Willis is at present au gaged on a world tour. The coasts of all the countries bordering on the Pacific Ocean, said the lecturer, had been visited by him. He had observed that mountian ranges were thrown up highest where the ocean was deepest off the coast. It was realised that the history of the earth was one of mountain ranges lifted up over a period of many centuries and worn away over another range of centuries, the process being repeated again and again. At times there had been a plain, at other times great ranges. To-day we lived in a period of very advanced mountain growth, because the world’s history had not often known such mountain ranges as we had to-day. Were periodicities of mountain elevation synchronous and the periods of wasting away synchronous all over the world, or were the operations taking place at different periods? In northern Europe and America, bordering, the Atlantic, periodicity seemed identical, but when he turned to the Pacific he found that at the time in history when there were no mountains in Europe, there were great mountains in the Pacific, and he found that the two ocean basins were unlike. He came to the conclusion that the Pacific Ocean basin had a different history. It seemed as though these two basins had forces actin" independently of each other., The mountains of Chile. North America, and Philippines, and some of the New Zealand mountains, all had a closely parallel historv. They were all young mountains, raised in the youngest geologieal period, the pleistocene, but he found great differences. What were the forces that worked. In the bed of the Pacific? Gravity had been credited with moving masses of the earth surface with roy-nded under surfaces, but this was discounted because there was no reason to sttpose that, nnv one part of the mass was heavier than anv other. There remained heat and molecular energy. Heat certainly released molecular energy. Why should this energy be more marked in or beneath the great ocean basin such ns that of the Pacific? He suggested that the quality of th ?,- rock t it was the more sensitive to heat, re-crystallisation, or to moling, and that it was the accumulated sinking in of the earth’s crust consequent on the expenditure of heat and energy over small positions at different periods that had actually, formed the greater ocean basin itself. -