Will the Earth Blow Up?

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2277, 8 September 1899, Page 4

Will the Earth Blow Up?

The latest theory about the end of the world is that ocean water, leaking through cracks in the crust, may reach the hot interior of the globe and blow up the whole earth ! No doubt the Atlantic Ocean could furnish steam enough to \ shatter Europe and America like rotten boilers. And there is no doubt, either, that there is sufficient heat in the interior of the globe to turn all the oceans to steam if they could be brought into contact with it. In fact, Vesuvius, Etna, and the tremendous volcanoes of the East Indies give proof that ocean water does reach parts of the vast furnace under our feet and that the destructive forces thus developed are irresistible. But it requires, comparatively, a mere drop of water to explode Vesuvius. The sides of its volcanic boiler are so thin that tltey give way with the first upward burst of steam, and the pressure beneath is instantly relieved. Occasionally the volcano sleeps for many years, the resistance within increases, a thick crust of rock chokes the crater, and when at last the explosion comes cities are utterly destroyed and all Italy is shaken. The awful eruption of Krakatoa, betweeu Sumatra and Java, in 1883, should be suflicient warning of the sleeping energies that lie within the earth, and that awaken with terrific power when water and tire meet between the rocks. That tremendous explosion of volcanic energy, that grand and splendid eruption, the greatest recorded in history, was caused by a crack in the crust of the earth running under the Strait of Sunda. It was reported that the explosion resulted from the leaking of sea water down into the crack in the underlying rocks which cross the strait, and passed through the island of Krakatoa, on which a volcano existed.

When it came, the explosion blew into dust two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa. Forty thousand people lost their lives on the coast of Java and the adjacent islands in the gigantic waves that the explosion rolled across the sea in every direction, and that in places carried ships up into the mountain valleys and left them stranded there! The destroyed island was blown, in a black cloud of dust, that spread artificial light over the neighbouring sea, twenty miles high. Part of it was carried in the upper portions of the air all around the globe, and microscopic particles of the ruined tropical island settled on the snow fields within the Arctic Circle.

The noise of the explosion was actually heard 3,000 miles away, and the atmospheric waves that it excited swept round and round the earth, and barometers in every land rose and fell, and rose and fell again, as the invisible surges passed through the air. These facts show what a very little sea water, leaking through a comparatively insignificant crevice in the earth's crust, has done and can do again. Suppose the ocean should find such a broad way to the terrestrial furnace as some of the cracks of the moon afford! That the moon was once the scene of an explosion which split it asunder from pole to pole is a possible, if not the most probable, explanation of those mysterious streaks which radiate from the gigantic crater called Tycho, in the moon's southern hemisphere, and cross mountains and valleys for hundreds and thousands of miles in every direction. These streaks are conspicuous in every photograph of the full moon, and can be seen by anybody with the aid of a small telescope.

If the water that once filled the now empty ocean beds of the moon poured down through great cracks upon the white hot interior rock 9, and being turned to steam, blew the inner globe apart, the subsequent appearances would not be unlike what we actually see. The moon in the opinion of scientific men would probably not be scattered like an exploding shell, but would simply be split apart on all sides. Then the fragments under the force of gravitation, would settle together, and along the cracks where they met, molten lava from the interior would ooze out, and this, upon hardening, would produce the appearance of long streaks, radiating like waggon spokes from the crater which had been the centre of the explosion.