THE ADRIATIC.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 16 August 1924, Page 14

THE ADRIATIC.

WHEN IT CEASES TO BE A SEA. we remember aright, one or Mark Twain’s “innocents abroad” who, having climbed to the top of a glacier in Switzerland, was observed to sit down -with every determination to remain seated, says the Manchester Guardian. To the. friend who urged upon him the heed for climbing down again he quoted Baedeker to the effect that the ice was moving steadily towards the village from which they had come, and announced his intention of availing himself of the transport provided by Nature. If the French geologist, M. Jacques Boucart, is right, the Italian patriot who casts a longing eye across the Adriatic can apply the same sort of argument to comfort himself. For the Adriatic, Mr Boucart asserts, will in course of time cease to be a sea. It has, of course, been silting up steadily through the ages at. its northern end, and the unique phvsiography of Venice is one of the results. But M. Boucart has been studying the Albanian and Dalmatian coasts, and he asserts that the. process is going forward even on the eastern shores of the Adriatic with some geological rapidity. He calculates that the sea floor in these parts lias risen 36 feet since, the days of the Boman Empire, and that in a mere, shake of a lamb’s tail, geologically speaking, the legendary lost land of Adriatic, which lies off the coast of Dalmatia, and is supposed to have been engulfed in the Quaternarv period, may come to the surface.

It is to be, hoped that, when it does, •the Mussolini of that day will not immediately claim it as new hinterland to Fiume, but that the League of Nations, having had ample warning, will prescribe with general consent an equitable means of dealing with a considerable addition to the world’s surface. In any event, however, the disappearance of the Adriatic or of any major part of it will ensure for the remote generations to come a fresh crop of Balkan problems, even if the existing Ones have by that time been satisfactorily solved. We, may on the whole be thankful that the English Channel, lightly dug though it was before the dawn of history, shows in the meantime no sign of silting up. Quite apart from international embarrassments, the possibility of cycling to Paris would rob going abroad of half its fun.