Submergence

“ The periods of rapid introduction of new forms of marine life were not periods of struggle, but of expansion—those periods in which the submergence of continents afforded new and large space for their extension and comfortable subsistence. ”

“ It is quite evident that such radical changes, embracing nearly all departments of social life, were not adopted en bloc, nor in a short space of time. Alterations in the relative level of sea and land, on so large a scale as the submergence of half a continent, are generally the result of slow cosmical processes. ”

“ Every breeze that sweeps over the ocean’s breast is fraught with hidden meaning, and every wave that breaks along our vessels side, will speak to us words of strength and import. Let us watch them as they heave and roll around us—listen to them as they whisper to each other in the soft low tones of their Curling Crests—see what a depth of quiet strength lies buried in the heaving swells as they rise and fall and roll along. ”

“ But while they lived, always submerged, always beneath the wave. Beneath the wave they might have powerful roots, stronger than iron; they might be tenacious and dangerous in their soft waving within the flood. ”

“ There is a strife between these currents, and on their confines eddies are formed which ships avoid, but there is no danger unless the wind blows strongly against the tide.
Besides the influence of the currents and the tides of the ocean in altering the configuration of the land, the sea is the home of innumerable forms of animal life, which are constantly laboring in the same direction. It has been truly said, that [706] a beef bone, thrown overboard by a sailor on a ship, may form the nucleus of a new continent. ”

“ Now, the body of a man lying in the water flat on his back will float with little or no exertion. It would appear, therefore, that similar proportions would suit a vessel whose purpose was floating only. It is not necessary to suppose that the ark had to contend with either storm or wind. The waves of water lying to the depth of a few fathoms upon a submerged continent could not, at any rate, be compared in violence to those of the ocean. ”

“ This small error told for much; for if coral could grow on deep-sea deposits when lifted up, and if it could also grow seaward, when once established, upon its own dead and sunken masses, then submarine elevations and not submarine subsidences might be the true explanation of all the facts. But what of the lagoons and the immense areas of sea behind the fringing reefs? How could these be accounted for? It was these which first impressed Darwin with the idea of subsidence. ”

“ But if we have no perfectly certain ideas regarding the propagation of the motions of the sea in depth, we can assert, that, whatever that extent and that power may be, the submarine currents no more abrade the rocks than rivers do the surface of the land. ”

“ Every page of the geological record proves to us that the relative levels of land and sea, and the position of the ocean and of continents and islands, has been always varying, and we may feel sure that some portions of the submarine area are now rising and others sinking. The force of tidal and other currents and of the waves during storms is sufficient to prevent the emergence of many lands, even though they may be undergoing continual upheaval. ”

“ Surge after surge pounds savagely on the great rocks of the reef, and finally a mighty wave that seems to be a giant effort of the madly tortured sea lifts a raging crest high up, and drops it in the roaring surf. A great rock splits beneath the blow, the wave runs up the tall thin shaft and dashes high above its top, and then drops swiftly down, while there, unharmed amid the vastness and the terror of the storm still stands the tower that puny man has built to warn ships from the dangers that surround it. ”

“ The tidal movement of the ocean, deep-sea currents, and the agitation of inland waters by the wind, lift up the sands strewn over the bottom by diluvial streams or sent down by mountain torrents, and throw them up on dry land, or deposit them in sheltered bays and nooks of the coast—for the flowing is stronger than the ebbing tide, the affluent than the refluent wave. ”

“ While the tide is out our main projects, stranded in this estuary that leads perhaps to the ocean of peace, must needs keel over and look askew; we must scrape our keels, calk leaks and wait for the great waters to return. ”

“ Always the eternal unrest of the moving waters has knocked at the door of human inertia to arouse the sleeper within; always the flow of stream and the ebb of tide have sooner or later stirred the curiosity of the land-born barbarian about the unseen destination of these marching waters. ”

“ This is a place for all men to cast anchor.' But when the tide is going out, you see how you have been deceived. Here is a reef that would wreck a navy; here is a jagged and cruel rock, and there another and another. With every one, you say to yourself, surely this is the last. ”

“ A little farther out, the sea breaks more roughly over submerged rocks, and the waves lift themselves, ere breaking, in an indescribable way, as if each gave a glimpse through a translucent window, beyond which all ocean's depths might be clearly seen. ”

“ The recurring destruction of submarine life to contribute in the building of the rocks of the Continents: the apparently endless cycles of emergence of the land and subsidence of the waters, to leave the Geographical conditions we see to-day, furnish additional evidence of the wonders of the past and force upon us anew the realization of how little in the great evolution is the epoch in which we live. ”

“ How infinitely greater, therefore, would be the action of the waters over all the materials subject to their disintegrating power, whether upon the islands and continents already raised above their waves, or upon the immense submarine tracks of rock just lifting up their peaks and waiting to be elevated into air? ”

“ At their death these fell to the bottom, and thus slowly through the ages the deposit was formed. The recent deep sea dredgings have shown the sea, at all depths, is full of animal life; and as the steady fall of snow-flakes in a winter's storm, piled up by currents of wind, form the drifts, or falling quietly, cover the ground uniformly, so the sea is full of the minute shells, which, carried by currents, form banks, or, falling evenly, prepare the plains which in the future will appear, in some upheaval, to form new continents. ”

“ It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. ”

“ On the contrary, it is a fact that the actual distribution of sea and of dry land on our planet is such that even a comparatively slight elevation of the floor of our oceans, together with some corresponding depression of the land, would spill over upon our continents enough water to submerge them completely, and to submerge them all. ”

“ The tides ebbing and flowing twice daily, lifting upon their bosom, like so many corks, the heaviest vessels, and baffling all efforts to restrain their resistless force, afford us another instructive topic for consideration in treating of the wasted forces of Nature—for here, again, she has lavished out of her superabundance infinitely more power than any conceivable increase of the needs and industries of man could ever employ. ”

“ By some unexplored tidal law, parties would seem to move through successive ebb and flow toward a final culmination of mischievous extreme, each refluent wave returning with heavier mass, until the accumulated weight of madness and folly overtopples, breaks, and dissolves in noisy foam. ”

“ The submerged forest that we have already examined stretched far below the level of mean tide, in fact we followed it down to the level of the lowest spring tides. Nothing but a change of sea-level will account for its present position. ”

“ Here we might show how the general truth, that every active force produces more than one change, is again exemplified in the highly-involved flow of the tides, in the ocean currents, in the winds, in the distribution of rain, in the distribution of heat, and so forth. But not to dwell upon these, let us, for the fuller elucidation of this truth in relation to the inorganic world, consider what would be the consequences of some extensive cosmical catastrophe—say the subsidence of Central America. ”

“ It must be granted that when the waves swell into mountains, and the tempest roars, its aspect is terrific; and we must be hardy indeed, not to consider it as a most formidable element in such times of awful visitation, when ships, breaking from their anchor, or driven from their course, rush before the winds that beat upon them with ungovernable fury, till, dismasted, and their rigging shivered in fragments, they sink, overwhelmed with a weight of waters, or strike some sand-bank, or shelving rock, and are at once dashed to pieces. ”

“ Only think of a sudden fall of water sufficient to raise the ocean a hundred feet, and submerge all parts of the land which were less than that height above the present level of the sea! There would, of course, be a fearful abridgment of our continents; all big islands would be made little ”

“ Each has found its own boundary and stayed there. Their spring tide once passed they have ceased to spread. They have become, indeed, many of them, but tideless oceans, dead seas of habit ceasing even to beat upon their shores. ”

“ Grants of land, bounded by the sea or by navigable rivers, where the tide ebbs and flows, extend to high-water mark, that is, to the margin of the periodical flow of the tide, unaffected by extraordinary causes, and the shores below common high-water mark belong to the State in which they are situated. ”

“ If there were no compensating action in the differential movement of land and sea in the transitional area, the whole of the land would be gradually planed down to a submarine platform, and all the globe would be covered with water. ”

“ But you see, Perry, as fast as the new land was made, the continent sank, so that the filling and sinking went ahead at about the same rate. Sometimes the sea won out, and we find a layer that is marine; sometimes the land won out, and the layer is a river or fresh-water deposit. ”

“ We would, therefore, be understood to ascribe this anomaly in the flowing and ebbing of the sea, to the obstruction which the current of its waters meets not only at the surface or margin, but at the bottom, which, from the variety of the soundings of the depths, appears to be as various as the face of the land. ”

“ Is it true, as many people think, that all fresh waters flow from the sea into the land, where they are forced by the terrible power of the waves into subterranean passages of the earth, just as we see it pour forth from those same channels to flow again into the ocean? ”

“ The easiest answer, and the one which most readily suggests itself, is that of a submersion of the continent at successive periods to allow the accumulation of these materials, and its subsequent elevation. I reject this explanation for the simple reason that the deposits show no sign whatever of a marine origin. ”

“ In the meantime, the bed of the sea would be continually filling up, the level of the sea would be continually rising, and thus the banks would be either wholly submerged through the effect of this cause alone, or they would have so slight an elevation above the sea-level that they would offer little resistance to the destructive effects of the sea, which would then have no other land to act upon. ”

“ It may therefore be supposed that the arrangements in the economy of nature are such as to require that the various kinds of marine animals, whose secretions are calculated to alter the specific gravity of sea water, to destroy its equilibrium, to beget currents in the ocean, and to control its circulation, should be distributed according to order. ”

“ But since these revolutions occur twice in the four-and-twenty hours, the sea rising twice and receding twice, and that regularly every day and night, how is it that the filling and failing of the well do not frequently occur during the ebb and flow of the tide? ”

“ Thus, the various catastrophes which have disturbed the strata, have not only caused the different parts of our continents to rise by degrees from the bosom of the waves, and diminished the extent of the basin of the ocean, but have also given rise to numerous shiftings of this basin. It has frequently happened, that lands which have been laid dry, have been again covered by the waters, in consequence either of their being ingulphed in the abyss, or of the sea having merely risen over them. ”

“ They come from the sea, an inexhaustible reservoir that covers with its waters a surface three times larger than that of all the continents joined together; from the sea, whose abysses go down at some places to the depth of 14 kilometers, and receive unceasingly the tribute of all the water-courses of the world, without ever being taxed beyond their capacity. ”

“ The vicinity of a mountain will deflect the plummet to a considerable degree, and a subterranean cavity may cause a deflection in the opposite way.
Let us now imagine the continents divided by a network of canals that connect all the seas, thus making of them one continuous sheet of water, as it were. Setting aside, for the purpose of the illustration, the oscillations caused by the tides, this sheet of water, assumed to be immovable, which represents the mean level of the sea, will exhibit elevations and depressions attributable to the local influences that deflect the plummet-line. ”