PATER’S CHATS WITH THE BOYS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3714, 19 May 1925, Page 67

PATER’S CHATS WITH THE BOYS.

DESERT PLACES. Desert places have been loosely described as treeless wastes. A better, or more correct, definition would be “Desert places are regions or areas devoid of plant life,” and places that lack r>lant life also lack animal life. The name desert has, then, been given to places on t..e earth’s surface because such areas have been deserted by plant and animal life. The question, then, will arise in boys’ minds as to what one would call the ice areas of Greenland and those forming the polar caps at the ends of the earth’s axis. Those regions are, as a rule, termed icy wastes. That name involves two terms, and, without trying to be funnv. Pater humbly suggests that a better term for thos icy wastes would be “isolations,” because the intense cold and deep silences of those regions isolates them from any occupation by men. By a stretch of the imagination and the reason the uninhabited ice places or regions could be termed deserts, but in claiming the right to apply the term we would have to go back millions and millions of years in the history of the evolution or development of the . surface of the earth as it is depicted to-day in our maps of the world. There is clear evidence that in the past geological ages there were milder climates at the poles., giving plant and animal life to those areas. All boys in the upper standards of our schools should know that the north polar ice-cap lies on top of water, and that the south polar cap is generally believed to cover land. We are certain there is land all round the South Pole; but whether or not there is a frozen lake or inland sea in the centre we cannot say. Amundsen, in making his famous dash to the South Pole, when the heroic Captain Scott and his equally heroic comrades made their trip, spoke of a curious phenomenon. He .said that when within a hundred miles of the Pole, as he and his men were marching along, a curiously hollow sound was given off by their tramping upon the wind-swept ice. He stated it sounded as if they were marching over a huge icecapped cavern. If that is true, it would seem to point to the idea that there has been a lake or inland sea round the South Pole, and below the immense thickness of the ice the water has fallen a little or has been drained off and left a space. This is only theory, or way of trying to account for'the hollow-sounding ring given off by the ice. There may be some other physical cause for the sound, but it remains still to be accounted for by scientific men. . . It was not the writer’s intention, when he began these notes, to give a lengthy description of the polar regions, and what has been said is mentioned only as being, as he thinks, interesting. Deserts, in the sense of the term, as they are so named, are what he meant to speak about. Sand deserts have been made either by tho forces of Nature or by the folly of man. When it is said that some deserts have been made by the folly of man, it is meant that men or nations did something that, could they have foreseen the results of their actions, they would have acted differently. Then Nature, which had been outraged by man, took her revenge and made a desert. Much of the desert country in Asia owes its origin to the thoughtlessness of man. The great Gobi, or stonv desert of Northern Chirm, is the result of man destroying the plain and mountain forest of that part of tho world. In Central Asia there are great sandy wastes which are still growing in extent, and those also owe their existence to the destruction of the piotective covering of bush and forest lands. Fertile plains, rivers, valleys, and towns have be- u, and still are, being buried by sandl drifts. Two large river#- * tho Sir-Daria and the Amu-Daria—whieh flow into the Sea of Aral, are steadily decreasing in volume, and the Sea of Aral Is becoming smaller in area, because the forests which protected the sources of the

water supply of those rivers from the winds and the sun have been destroyed. There are desert places in Persia, Mesopotamia—now called Irak—in Syria, and in the Holy Land, that have been caused by ravages of the race wars of nations or empires that have long passed away. thinking men of to-day, having become aware of the causes or agencies that liave produced these wastes, have drawn tho attention of the rulers of civilised countries to the dangers; and that is why we now read so much about tree planting or afforestation in books and newspapers. The Americans of North America, recognising the danger, are protecting their forests and aro giving great attention to afforestation. Even in New Zealand, where the hush on the hills and in the valleys has been cut away or burned, we have within the brief period of two or three generations seen hill streams disappear and the volume of spring-fed creeks or small rivers decrease. Climates also have been altered for the worse by the destruction of bush or plant life generally. It is said that the frequency of the dreadful tornadoes in the United States are mostly due to the ground becoming quickly heated owing to tlie destruction of the protective covering of the forests and the carpet of the prairie grasses. Nature’s own deserts, such as. those of the Sahara, Arabia, Arizona, and Colorado in North America, and Atcama in South America, owe their formation to the elevation of the land, the natural rock surface, and the position of the great mountain ranges. Wherever there is an elevated sandstone plateau of any great area a desert will be found. Rivers and streams cut down their beds so quickly in the soft sandstone that deep U valleys are formed. These deep valleys are called canyons in America and wadis in Arabia. Such deep river-beds cease to water the plateau surface, and the land becomes a desert. Another factor or cause is that any rain that may fall is quickly evaporated by the clear and heated atmosphere above those high plateau, and by the dry winds that blow over their areas. Again, the heat of the days and the cold of the nights disintegrates or crumbles up the exposed rock surface and forms sand, which blows about and still further cuts up the surface, leaving the harder grains to make yet more sand. After that the sand tills up valleys, thus increasing the sandy wastes or desolations. In North America' en are reclaiming the deserts from the hand of Nature by means of irrigation works, just as in ! Otago we are making certain areas very fertile by the same means. The British Government has done much of this kind of work in North-west India, and is doing the same in the Sudan by building a huge dam in the valley of the Blue Nile. In Irak or Mesopotamia it also proposes to assist the Arab Government of Irak in great schemes for using the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris to restore the fertility and great producing powers of those great river plains which, once upon a time over 4000 years ago and more, supported great populations and were the homes of ancient civilisation and great and wealthy empires.