THE WARFARE ON OUR EASTERN COAST 



211 



started just after the Civil War by the 

 cutting of trees for ship timbers, and, al- 

 though the section is known today as the 

 Great Woods, there is not a stick of tim- 

 ber to be seen. 



how man's fight is made: 



The men who live along the seashore 

 have learned, in a measure, how to com- 

 bat the migration of the sands. While 

 in some instances there are kinds of 

 wind breaks which have helped, the most 

 effective mode of warring against the 

 migrating tendencies of the sands is 

 found to be that of employing plant life 

 as an ally. Various kinds of grasses and 

 rapidly growing trees which flourish in 

 sandy soil have been planted over the 

 dunes, and as they take root they bind 

 the sands to earth and prevent them from 

 blowing away. This method of combat- 

 ing the shifting spirit of the sand dune 

 has been more widely used in Europe 

 than in America, yet everywhere that it 

 has been employed it has given the most 

 excellent results. 



Another force, indirectly related to the 

 wind and the wave, which has done much 

 to alter the shoreline of the world, is the 

 erosive power of running water. 



THE POWER OP RUNNING WATER 



It is estimated that the rivers of the 

 earth carry 6,500 cubic miles of water 

 to the sea every year. If the reader can 

 imagine a column of water 10 miles 

 square and reaching 65 miles skyward, 

 he will get a fair idea of the tremendous 

 work that the sun and the winds have to 

 do in pumping up this water out of the 

 sea and carrying it over the earth. Per- 

 haps a third of this is expended on the 

 landed area of the earth. Imagine a 

 falls half a mile high and as large as 

 10,000 Niagaras tearing away at the con- 

 tinents every day and wresting material 

 from them and transporting it to the 

 sea. This represents the work of the 

 running waters. The Mississippi River 

 alone carries more than 1,000,000 tons 

 of material to the Gulf of Mexico every 

 day. It would require nearly 1,700 

 Lidgerwood dirt trains, such as were 

 used at Panama, to move each day's de- 

 posits that the Mississippi brings to the 



Gulf. The total bulk of material re- 

 moved annually from the Mississippi 

 Valley into the Gulf through the Mis- 

 sissippi River is greater than the total 

 amount of material removed from the 

 Panama Canal, as it stands today, by the 

 French and the Americans. In view of 

 this fact the statement of General Goe- 

 thals, the builder of the Panama Canal, 

 that the man who attacks the task of 

 deepening the Mississippi River will have 

 the biggest engineering job ever under- 

 taken by man, indeed becomes significant. 



THE WORK OF CONTINENT BUILDING 



How rapidly the Mississippi is carry- 

 ing forward its task of changing the 

 shoreline of Louisiana is revealed by the 

 fact that it is building a mile of Louisi- 

 ana territory into the Gulf every 17 years. 

 Its delta, assuming that a delta begins 

 at the first point where a break occurs 

 and river water escapes to the sea, is 

 now more than 200 miles long. This 

 territory, which has been entirely built 

 up by the river, now contains nearly 

 12,000 square miles, making it equal in 

 size to the State of Maryland. For every 

 fifteen hundred pounds of water that the 

 Mississippi carries to the sea it carries 

 one pound of material, either solid or in 

 solution. It carries down to the sea 

 nearly eight times as much material as the 

 Nile, whose alluvial burdens have en- 

 riched Egypt for thousands of years. 



THE EARTH'S RESPIRATION 



Another agency that has had wonder- 

 ful effect on the shorelines of the earth 

 is that of the alternate subsidence and 

 elevation of lands. There are many sci- 

 entists who say that a large portion of 

 the eastern coastline of the L T nited States 

 is now undergoing a subsidence, and 

 they point to many remarkable facts 

 in support of that theory. For instance, 

 at a navy yard on the New England 

 coast, it is shown that high and low water 

 marks have shifted in. recent decades. 

 There are those who claim that this 

 merely indicates a compression of the 

 land and not a subsidence. But this ob- 

 jection is answered by the statement that 

 while high and low water marks have 

 shifted, points on shore bear identically 



