SHRINKING OF THE EARTH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20217, 30 March 1929, Page 5 (Supplement)

SHRINKING OF THE EARTH.

If George Washington were living today and started to walk around the world, ho would not have to walk quite so far as ho would at the time of retiring from the Presidency of tho United States, according to Dr. E. E. Free, in the San Francisco Chronicle. Were it possible to make the walk precisely on the Equator, traversing oceans and continents in a straight line, the decrease of distance would be at least one and onehalf miles and perhaps as great as two and one-third. The earth has shrunk in circumference between one and two miles in the last century, At least that is the conclusion reached by Professor Bruno Meyermann, of the University of Goettingen, Germany. The shrinkage, says the astronomer, is indicated by a slight increase in speed of tho earth's rotation, made evident by tho fact that tho length of the day grows shorter by a small fraction of a second each year. Whether tho slow shrinkage will continue, century by century, until the earth is only a fraction of its present size, or whether it will be made up, in a century or two, by a corresponding enlargement, no one knows. Most scientists expect, however, that enlargement will come, so that not even man's remote descendants of millions of years hence are in danger of having the earth shrink ; up I under them and thrust them off into space..