34 • The Atlantic 



like one part in 300. It would take a very sharp eye indeed to detect 

 the difference between a five-foot sphere and a five-foot ellipse that 

 truly represented the earth's proportions. 



Now to get back to our ocean, we have already referred to the fact 

 that if the mountains and the continents themselves were all shaved 

 away and dumped into the depths of the sea so as to make a perfectly 

 round sphere, the ocean would cover all the land to a depth of one 

 and one-half miles. This is an important statement because it does 

 give us an impression of the amount of water in our oceans. But on 

 our five-foot globe, water a mile and a half deep would be represented 

 by a very thin film indeed. 



A Dutch astronomer. Van den Bergh, put the matter something 

 like this. Take a new soccer ball and blow it tight, roll it quickly 

 through a puddle of water and pick it up. Our earth is about as wet 

 as the soccer ball you now hold in your hand. 



Of course, not all the moisture of the earth is at any one time all in 

 the oceans. There is always some of it in the air in the shape of 

 clouds. From the human point of view, we have become accustomed 

 to think of the clouds and atmosphere as being very high indeed just 

 as we think of the mountains and the sea as very high and deep. Some- 

 times it looks to us as though the moon were racing through the clouds, 

 but here again poetic imagery has gotten the better of reality. The enve- 

 lope of air or atmosphere that surrounds the earth is more dense at 

 sea level, and as we progress upward, the atoms of the gases that 

 compose our atmosphere get farther and farther apart. On account of 

 our interest in rocket flight, the upper air is intensively studied today 

 and extraordinary new facts are turning up about it. But for general 

 purposes we may say, sixty miles above the earth our atmosphere 

 begins to approach a vacuum; about as good a vacuum as we can cre- 

 ate in a laboratory with an ordinary vacuum pump. On our five-foot 

 globe the air would be represented by a sort of smoky film that 

 would disappear entirely half an inch away from the surface of the 

 globe. On this same scale the moon would be 160 feet away. All of the 

 useful air, the air in which man can breathe, the winds can blow, 

 the clouds can scud, the lightning flash and the thunder roll, the 

 rain and snow and hail fall back upon the earth, all the airy drama 

 that directly affects man . . . would take place in a thin film 1/25 of 

 an inch high. 



There it is, a sort of abstract extraterrestrial view of the earth and 

 the oceans. Looked at in this way, perhaps neither the ocean nor man 

 seem, for the moment, to be very important. We have built up our 



