IS THE EARTH DRYING UP?

Evening Star, Issue 12943, 5 May 1908, Page 8

IS THE EARTH DRYING UP?

The moon is dried up and dead; Mars is following in its footsteps; the earth is chasing Mars. In this race towards planetary death the small planets come in ahead. Astronomers on the great planet Jupiter, which is as yet mostly vaporous or liquid, will one day be watching with their telescopes the last desperate efforts of the descendants of Adam to get water enough to keep themselves alive, just as we to-day are studying with wonder the gigantic irrigation system that gridirons the face of Mars. The statement that the earth is drying up is no figment of the imagination, says Professor Serviss. Startling evidence of its all too manifest truth has lately been brought to light m the centre of Asia, the greatest of the continents. Similar evidence exists in the desert of Sahara, but that dried up so long‘ before recorded history that it does not impress us as the result of a continuing process. In Asia, on the other hand, this process is now seen in opera-l tion. Every recent explorer in Central Asia has marvelled at its manifestations. It is a signboard pointing the way that nil the continents must ultimately go. —Relics of the Past. — In the heart of the vast land that was the cradle of mankind exists a little saltlake, the Lop Nor, which, century by century, draws in its boundaries, shrinking and shrinking, while the vast sandy plains pound it expand and expand. Surrounding this enormous desiccated area is a zone still inhabitable, and inhabited by nomadic tribes—“ a continental ring,” says Mr Huntington, a recent explorer, “ around a sea forever dry.” It is a sea that has sand and dnst instead of water, where the winds roll before them huge waves of sand that continually advance, billow behind billow, burying everything! Sometimes there is a change, sometimes the moisture seems to gain and life advances, all, however, to be ultimately swept back and swallowed up in the relentless march of the demon of desires tion. The stumps of dead forests, the ruins of sand-buried villages and cities, the traces of hard areas, where flocks once fed, show everywhere the same picture of continental expanses turning into arid wastes. In some places man is resisting still, as he has long resisted, the advanc<( of the drought fiend. Extensive irrigation has been resorted to. But with the progress of the years the irrigation systems become but the playthings of the winddriven sand, whose inroads are as resistless as those of the ocean when it burst? * its barriers in a winter storm. j —A Gradual Change.—

There may be a back set of this tide, as there have been back sets in the past, but it will only be temporary. The “ pulscj of Asia ” beats always the march of final desiccation. Man can arrest the evil, temporarily and locally. But the law of Nature is against him. The end is certain. It may be delayed for countless centuries, but it will come. The underlying cause of this drying up of a placet) is to be sought in something else than the climate. Climatic changes are results rather than causes. A world like the earth is an organism where existence is limited by the laws of its own being. The

earth is habitable now; it has oceans, and rivers, and green fields, and men and cities because it is still relatively young. Planetary old age means planetary cooling and drying. The heated interior of the globe is thirsty; it is a chemical thirst that it feels,: a thirst for combination of elements, which will be satisfied as fast as the heat leaks out. It has been demonstrated over and over again that the in-> ternal rocky frame of the globe is capable of containing all the oxygen and hydrogen of the oceans and the atmosphere, of drinking them in by chemical combination, and it will drink them in as soon as| the cooling process permits. Who that examines the great lunar plains with a telescope can doubt that once they were covered with water ? And when it possessed water no doubt it possessed life. We shall repeat the tragedy of the moon, and the fact that the repetition must yet be delayed for thousands of generations does not render it Jess intorestintr to thought.