INDIAN OCEAN BED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21987, 23 June 1933, Page 6

INDIAN OCEAN BED

SEARCH FOR LOST CONTINENT. British scientists are to explore the ' bottom of the Indian Ocean, four miles below the surface, in a search for traces of the lost continent of “ Lemuria.” An ‘expedition, under Captain J. M. ! Mackenzie, who captained the Discovery on Sir Douglas Mawson’s last voyage in the Antarctic, will leave London in August to begin the search. They will be nine months at sea (between Africa i and India) in a tiny research craft of only 105 tons, the Mabahiss, which, is now being fitted at Alexandria with the latest inventions for under-sea ex- | ploration. These include a new British echo sounding machine, which not only records the depth by the length of time an echo takes to return from the sea bottom, but also provides a running representation of the ocean bed on an apparatus like a tape machine. Steel bottles, which close automatically at a certain depth, will be let down to take specimens of the sea life and record temperatures. Lead lines will be dropped four miles down to take samples of the ocean bottom. In this way the expedition hopes to discover traces of the continent of “ Lemuria,” which is supposed to have stretched from Madagascar to Sumatra and India in prehistoric times. Another object is to discover whether there are mountains ranges and ridges under the sea such as the Meteor expedition found in the Atlantic. Mr J. C. Murray, chairman of the expedition committee, stated that the expedition would be financed from the will of the late Sir John Murray, his father, who was a member of the famous Challenger expedition. The scientific lender of the expedition will be Colonel Seymour Sewell, D.Sc., director of the Zoological Survey of India. j