THE IMPENETRABLE SEA 



immense mass of silt there would be required a fleet of 

 2,000 ships, each with a capacity of 1,400 tons, and they 

 would have to descend the river daily and throw their 

 cargoes into the sea." Fabre, in all his books, was a 

 careful and reliable investigator, and he evidently gave 

 much painstaking research to this question of the amount 

 of sediment carried into the sea by the Yangtse Kiang. 

 Of the Hwang Ho he said : "It amasses at its mouth every 

 twenty-five days enough sediment to make an island a 

 kilometre square, and it threatens to fill up the vast gulf 

 into which it empties." 



Despite these facts, the rushing influx of water from 

 the world's streams and rivers overwhelmingly exceeds 

 in volume the amount of soil and silt that the ocean 

 receives. The sea returns the land's gifts so munificently 

 that it makes the land look like a poor relation. In- 

 credibly old, it has all the time it needs as it crumbles 

 and batters the world's coastlines. Cliflfs break away, 

 boulders and rocks crash down, rocks become pebbles 

 and pebbles are broken down into sand. Fossils of 

 creatures which once lived in the sea deeps have been 

 found in rocks 15,000 feet above the surface : but the sea 

 has only loaned them to the land, knowing that they 

 must be repaid with interest. 



The sea has allies other than its rivers and streams 

 and currents. It has its ice-caps. Every 100 years the 

 melting of these releases such a vast volume of water into 

 the world's oceans that it raises the sea another eight 

 inches. The melting of the ice-caps is a natural process 

 which is being considerably accelerated by mankind's 

 use of oil and gas as fuel, the burning of which is dis- 

 charging gases that are warming the atmosphere around 

 the earth to a height of as much as sixteen miles. Some 

 authorities calculate that, if this acceleration continues, 

 the ocean levels will rise at least forty feet and flood 

 huge areas — particularly such low-lying areas as South 

 Florida, parts of New York City, downtown San Fran- 



76 



