OCEAN 



4332 



OCEAN 



eclipse, but when the same thing happen 

 star or a planet it is known as occultation, 

 which means, literally, hiding, or concealing. It 

 is a much more common occur- 

 rence than an eclipse, for the 



moon in its revolution is constantly passing 

 hot worn the earth and some star. In non-tech- 

 nical terms, at such times a star disappears 

 behind the moon, and is there- 

 fore invisible. See ECLIPSE. 



CEAN, o'shan, or 

 SEA. There is, strictly speak- 

 ing, only one ocean, covering with its salty 



nearly three-fourths of the globe. How- 

 ever, the continents which, like immense islands, 

 lift themselves above "Old Ocean's gray and 

 melancholy waste," divide it roughly into five 

 parts: the stormy Atlantic, commercially the 

 most important; the great Pacific, deepest and 



taking more than a fourth of the earth's 

 area for its bed; the Indian, with its gentle 

 -ml fierce, sudden hurricanes; and the 

 two polar seas, the Arctic and Antarctic, whose 

 icy waters have not yet been fully explored, so 

 difficult are they to distinguish from the frozen 

 mainland. 



impossible to fix the precise boundaries 

 of the different oceans, for the three greatest 

 the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian merge their 



in the Antarctic, and the first two meet 

 again in the Arctic. Divisions are largely arti- 

 ficial, for. as the poet Barry Cornwall says, in 

 his Song oj tin 



Without a mark, without a bound. 



It runneth the earth's wide regions round. 



The land masses are so closely grouped that 

 it i< ] o :Me to speak of a land hemisphere 

 and a irnti r l misphere, as shown in the chart, 

 with New Zealand the approximate center of 

 the water hemisphere, as London is of the 

 other: 



The Depth of the Sea. The bed of the ocean 

 is many thousands of feet below the glittering 

 surface waters. More than two miles 11,500 

 feet is the average depth, Which is five times 

 the average elevation of the land. The great- 

 est depth thus far discovered is over six miles 

 32,088 feet a sounding made in the Pacific off 

 the island of Mindanao, one of the Philippine 

 group. If the- highest mountain on earth, 



Mount Everest of the Hima- 

 layas, could be moved to this 

 point and dropped to the bottom, its snow- 

 capped summit would be 3,000 feet below the 

 waves. 



The Bed of the Ocean. The ocean's floor has 

 its depressions and elevations, but on the whole 

 is far smoother than the surface of the land. 

 This is because it is protected by the great 

 body of water above it and is not subject to 



Arctic Ocean 4,000,000 Sq M. 

 mm Antarctic Ocean 7.500.000 Sq Mi 



mmummmmmmmmmmmm \nd\an Ocean 28,000,000 Sq Mi 

 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Atlantic Ocean. 34,000,000 Sq. Mi. 



Pacific Oceaa 71.000.000 Sq. Mi 



WATER AND LAND HEMISPHERES 

 Showing, also, the areas of the five oceans. 



the action of the forces of erosion, such as wind 

 and water, which carve and cut away the land. 

 In the deep sea everything is calm and quiet, 

 however stormy the water may be on the sur- 

 face. 



In most parts of the ocean the floor is cov- 

 ered with the chalky fossils of millions and mil- 

 lions of tiny creatures called joraminijera; 

 and our chalk cliffs and chalk beds are old 

 ocean bottoms which received these deposits 

 through countless centuries, and then, by the 

 forces which move the earth's crust, were slowly 

 raised out of the water, while some correspond- 

 ing part of the land sank and became ocean 



