ATLANTIC LEGEND 63 



the height of the Himalayas close to two hundred feet — all in 

 a blink of time. The slower changes — slow to us — are the 

 westward drift and slow sinking of the Greenland coast while 

 the Swedish peninsula, the Gulf of Bothnia, Finland, and 

 parts of Russia are rising in height several feet a century — this 

 as a release of strain from an icecap that began to disappear 

 more than fifty thousand years ago. In fact the modern world, 

 geologically speaking, is in a period of revolution, with its end 

 not yet in sight. 



What happened when the land bridge between England 

 and the continent subsided, or when the two lakes of the 

 Mediterranean basin suddenly rose with the waters coming in 

 at Gibraltar from the Atlantic? The first width of the Straits 

 — as reported by the ancients, according to Forrest — was in 

 500 B.C. only about a mile; at the time of Christ about seven 

 miles; and in 400 a.d. twelve miles; the present width is fifteen 

 miles. How accurate these early estimates are is open to dis- 

 pute. But there may have been a slowly continuing separation 

 of the continents there in recent geological time. If a large 

 area of inhabited land went under the waves since the last ice- 

 cap retreated from Europe, there must be some undersea indi- 

 cations of such a change. 



We have spoken in a previous chapter of the mid-Atlantic 

 Ridge, which runs as a gigantic submarine mountain chain 

 from the old continental shelf between Greenland and Eng- 

 land to somewhere between the southernmost parts of South 

 Africa and South America. If we assume that it was geologi- 

 cally possible, if not very probable, that a large body of habi- 

 table land previously existed west of Gibraltar, there is nothing 

 that we know of climatic conditions at the end of the last gla- 

 ciation that would preclude reasonably temperate weather in 

 the Atlantic area. At present not more than two percent of 

 the warm waters of the Gulf Stream reach the Arctic Ocean, 

 and yet that two percent accounts for open seas about south- 



