Real Climate Records

NEW YORK, Sun. (O.S.R.) : The earth is not cooling off, but is warming up, Dr. Harold Urey, discoverer of heavy water, believes. His theory is that the earth was created not from a liquid ball of fire, but from dust.

Urey won the Nobel Prize in 1934 for discovering heavy water, one of the important links in the scientific chain which led to the atom-bomb.

Urey is a chemist. His theories about the earth derive from a chemist’s approach to existing evidence about the first formation of the globe.

According to Urey, the earth began as a huge aggregation of dust, which gathered together

into a ball in space. The dust included every kind of chemical, including a lot of radio active elements.

Then, says Urey. the dustball began to sort itself out. The ball compacted itself into something resembling a sphere. Then the iron particles, melted by the terrific heat, began to run, because of the! weight, towards the centre of the earth.

They found their way by running in little rivulets through veins of silicate. The centre of the earth now, Urey says, must be something like the meteorites — stony iron masses — which occasionally slip through the atmosphere and flame their way to earth.

As the iron sank into the middle of the earth, Urey adds, it displaced the lighter materials at the centre and pushed them up to the surface.

This forced-up material became the continents — land masses raised above water level

— with mountains raised in turn above the lowlands.

The water (itself formed from the dust) probably lay literally boiling upon the whole surface

of the earth before the iron sank. The sinking iron and the jiggling of the earth’s surface has been responsible for some strange earth movements, Urey says.