EARTH AND SKY

Evening Star, Issue 22891, 24 February 1938, Page 1

EARTH AND SKY

MYSTERIES SCIENCE SEARCHES Exploration on the level is nearly over. That is why science increasingly looks—when it considers area—up and down, says Geraldl Heard. Into the depths we have advanced slowly. The record _ for the deepest plunge into the sea is still only 3,028 teet. Echo-sounding gear, however, goes on mapping the ocean floor .with an amazing exactitude. Supor dredging has been carried on in 1936-37 on the Great Shelf—the great step down—some hundred miles out from the American coast of the Atlantic, where the comparatively shallow water gives way to the true deep.: What the grapples brought up from this cliff face, which no eye has ever seen,' was evidence of a very surprising sort. The rods which the pincers plucked from the precipice had in it fossils of the Miocene age, fossils which seem to show that this diff was part of a vast extension of the land (and restriction of the ocean) at a date, geologically speaking, almost to be called recent—some 16,000,000 years ago. The latest opinion of the RockiesAndes mountain chain is that it is what it seems, a humple in the great cloth of land which is being made to creep to the west. ‘So the Atlantic engulfs America and America pushes on to take it out of the Pacific.

The famous Wegener hypothesis—the idea that the continents do float about, cake and crust, on a heavier viscid porridge —(the magma) underneath—is gaining ground. So much for where we stand as to the earth itself. To discover what is above our heads has proved easier. In the last decade we have all betun to realise that the blue sky is a ome, or, to use Browning’s even exactor phrase, a “ targe,” a vault on which not only radio waves, but sound waves echo and rebound.

Outer space is dense with the hardest, most penetrating, and deadly rays. It is thick with these finest, fastest darts of force which are so keen that they would pass through our bodies far more easily than a machinegun bullet through a sheet of paper. We should die under these stabs, which are too sharp to leave a wound. The study of the air beyond the stratosphere has shown that it is very peculiar. More than a hundred miles up—when practically all that we should call air has been left behind, when there is nothing which a lung could breathe or a plane fly upon—we do not get into the cold of outer stellar space. We find instead a thin belt of intense “ heat ” now estimated l to be no less than l,7oodeg Fahrenheit—the heat of a furnace. Meteorologists noticed 20 years ago that meteors burned up very much more quickly than they should if the upper air was as cold as it had been assumed. Unless the upper air had this strange incinerating quality we down here would have far more direct hits. from the shoals of meteorites which are always rushing into our attraction. The chance of being missed by a meteorite, even if it got through, would, however, still ho immense. This “torpedo-net” 100 miles up must be hard as well as hot. Odd as it is to think of a bubble of invisible flame enclosing our earth hung between us and the moon and the stars, it is even more odd to think of that transparent vault being solid—as though it were equal to a foot thickness of lead. For two generations explorers in the extreme north had; been aware of a nervous condition called Arctic hysteria, which might overtake the strongest men for no apparent reason. Careful tests reveal that as much as two days before the oncoming of one of the dreaded Arctic storms —storms which are attended and may he caused by intense magnetic disturbance —the human heart-beat generally sinks to about half its normal rhythm. This rising tension and tempo certainly seem to have some magnetic conditions which are soon to discharge themselves in the Arctic tempest.