Real Climate Records

There is a lot of water in this world —323,722,000 cubic miles of it in the oceans

alone—and there is more coming.

According to Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geo-physicist, a mysterious warming of the Arctic climate is melting the Arctic ice, including the vast Greenland ice-cap.

As this ice melts, water is pouring into the ocean and raising the sea level at what geologists regard as a dizzy rate.

Dr. Ahlmann told the Geophysical Institute of the University of California that the ocean level in the Spitzbergen area had risen one inch in the last 25 years.

He said that if the ice areas continued melting at the present rate, the ocean surface would rise to catastrophic proportions, and peoples living in lowlands bordering the seashores would be inundated.

“The Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study conditions on a global basis,” he said.

By “speedily” Dr. Ahlmann naturally meant in the geological sense. He meant that if nothing were done about it in the next thousand years or so, there might be serious consequences for lowland dwellers.

This sort of thing has happened before, and must have caused untold tribulation to people who had not been warned in time.

As recently as the Pleistocene Age-about a million years ago-we had the trouble in reverse.

All the northern seas froze and all but a small part of Europe, north Asia and North America was covered with ice.

The ice covering the land areas represented a lot of water which was unable to get back into the sea, and geologists have calculated that during the Pleistocene Age the level of the sea dropped 350 feet.

Frigid Britons, to keep warm, could then have walked dryshod to the Continent, dodging the mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, lions, hyenas, bears and woolly rhinoceros that beset their paths.

Later (in the Quaternary Period) this Jana and sea ice melted, and the ocean level rose again roughly about 350 feet.

The suddenness (geologically speaking) of this rise must have caused concern to our ancestors living on the lowlands. They had no geologists and no newspapers to warn them; and here was sea surging up to engulf them at the rate of four inches a century!

Homing Britons (if any) arriving on the Belgian coast, to find the English Channel, where once firm ice had been, must have known their first Dunkirk-and no coracles to rescue them.

FROM the very beginning- man and the land animals have had a very precarious foothold.

When the whirling, fiery ball that is now the earth first started to cool, when the molten mass that is now the moon had torn loose and hurtled into space, leaving a gap now filled by the Pacific Ocean, the outer crust of our globe solidified in wrinkles and folds. Dense clouds of steam condensed and filled the hollows, and the oceans were born.

When man evolved, he found himself

confined to a mere 3-10ths of the globe there were 142,000,000 square miles of ocean, and only 55,000,000 square miles of land.

What was worse, the oceans were deeper than the land masses were high. Geologists have since calculated that if the whole surface of the globe were levelled out it would

be two miles under the sea.

And wind, rain, rivers, glaciers and the sun’s heat are steadily levelling the earth’s surface.

English geologists, for instance, take the gloomy view that unless their islands are heaved up a little by some subterranean disturbance all Britain will be washed into the sea within the next 3,000,000 years.

The rest of the land surface of the globe is in little better plight. China’s Yellow River alone is discharging into the Gulf of Pe-chih-li each year sufficient mud to cover a square mile to a depth of 730 feet, and the Mississippi is doing something similar to America, though not at the same rate.

If this goes on without any compensating land upheavals, geologists say, the whole land surface of the globe will be washed into the oceans within 5,000,000 years.