THE IMPENETRABLE SEA 



Statistics regarding the world's oceans abound in such 

 paradoxes, even as the knowledge man has gained of 

 them sparkles with countless facts, sonie of them so 

 amazing that they seem miraculous. 



The diagram on the following page should now be 

 easily understood. It emphasizes in pictorial form the 

 fact that the world is not ''three parts water" as some 

 people imagine, using loose terminology, but mainly 

 covered with water, and that so superficially that we live 

 upon a sphere which is almost entirely dry (almost com- 

 pletely waterless) when its bulk is compared with the 

 film of water overwhelming its surface. 



Because we are surface creatures we necessarily obtain 

 a very distorted impression of the volume of the ocean as 

 compared with the mass of the earth, and with our con- 

 ception of the solar system itself. 



We are microscopical life-forms in a planetary system 

 which may seem vast to us as we circle our parent sun, 

 but which is actually a minute speck compared with the 

 Cosmos itself. 



If the world were completely smooth it would be 

 flooded to a depth of two miles, so that ''dry land life" 

 as we know it could not possibly exist upon it. Even 

 now, if we consider the significance of the fact that the 

 world's dry land has an average elevation above the 

 surface of the sea of only 2,500 feet (a film of dry land so 

 thin that it cannot possibly be represented by a line thin 

 enough in our diagram) our position as dry land 

 creatures is precarious. 



A disturbance of sufficient severity in any of the ocean 

 beds could raise the level of the world's waters that 

 slight fraction, proportionately, which would result in a 

 flooding of its entire land surface. 



Fortunately for us the waves of the ocean scarcely rise 

 above its average surface level. Yet the total volume of 

 the waters resting on the world's sea beds is 324 million 

 cubic miles — fourteen times as great as the volume of the 



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