36 : The Atlantic 



dependent; in the case o£ topsoil on the land, it is so thin as to be 

 almost immaterial. It is not surprising that a flush of rain or a puff 

 of air can endanger life over a large area by washing soil away into 

 the rivers and the seas. 



It is important, from time to time, to be able to adopt a cold view 

 with respect to man's place in nature. It is equally important not to 

 let a cold view become a fixation. After all, it is in this filmy scum of 

 rock and sea and air wrapped around the dense core of the world that 

 we live out our destiny of privation or richness, of war or peace. This 

 is our ultimate base and we must preserve it as well as master it. The 

 knowledge that we are held to so thin a paring of the world's space 

 and that we stand so insecurely upon the margin of a vast universe 

 does not destroy the human view or the human responsibility. Man 

 need not be too humble because, so far as he can know, he is the only 

 actor on the stage. He has traveled about the globe and today is peer- 

 ing into the sky and the sea. He has discovered and so, in a way, 

 helped to create the universe. From the human point of view, the 

 lands are still fruitful, the heavens beautiful and the oceans deep. 



We have come to a more realistic picture of the Atlantic Ocean. It 

 is not a great reservoir of water filling up a pool or trough gouged 

 deeply out of the earth as we have so often imagined. It is in fact a 

 vast but thin sheet of water curving around the world between the 

 continents. With related seas it stretches over 12,500 miles in a north- 

 south direction or more than halfway around the world and on an 

 irregular line from the eastern end of the Mediterranean to the western 

 end of the Gulf of Mexico over 8,000 miles or over one-third of the way 

 around the world at the equator. The average depth or thickness of 

 this very irregular sheet is only 3,332 meters or a little over two 

 miles. Even the North Atlantic without its shallow seas has an aver- 

 age depth of less than four kilometers or two and one-half miles. So 

 when the depth of the ocean is compared with its extent it is seen to 

 be on the average no thicker than the paper this book is printed on. 



Yet within this thin sheet the Atlantic carries on an intense and 

 complicated life of its own. At the surface move winds and weathers, 

 currents and tides; below the surface the ocean is made up of distinct 

 and recognizable masses of water with known limits and depths and 

 each marked from the other by special characteristics. 



We may think of these waters as the parts or organs that make up 

 the body of the ocean. However, since each part enters actively into 

 the life of the ocean we may properly deal with them in the next chap- 

 ter which considers the behavior of the Atlantic. 



