TO CHECK THE CHAWING SEA.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2185, 14 September 1907, Page 4 (Supplement)

TO CHECK THE CHAWING SEA.

REMARKABLE CHANGES IN WORLD’S GEOGRAPHY DURING THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

How the Gentle “ Lap, Lap,” of the waves is Eating into the Vitals of Mother Earth.

(By Charles Frederick Carter in the “Tecluuical World Magazine.”)

.Now that ii Royal Commission on Const Erosion is trying to find somo ! v»iy to save enough of England from j the waves to supply a site for headquarters from which to govern the rest of the British Umpire, it may he remarked without any appearance of seeking to bear seaside real estate that the final revisions of geography were not mule by the great cataclysms of the remote past. The hungry sea. forever gnawing at their coasts, is working changes in contii nemts and islands which, measured bv geological standards, arc rapidIf nrocesses now active should be continued uninterruptedly the time is near at hind, by the geological calendar, when some extraordinary transformations will have been wrought on the face of the earth. If , it were possible for mortal perception to penetrate the future, perhaps steamships might be seen ploughing the waters over the very spots where Galveston, New Orleans, (Savannah. a,ul Charleston now stand, on thenway to wharves far inland from the present coast line. Perhaps the long swell of the ocean might be seen rolliug across wlvat are now I/ong Island and Manila, tlnn Island to break upon the Palisades. Perhaps Holland ini'dit once more form a part of the llJr of the North Sea. Berlin and Paris might be the chief seaports of Germany and Prance instead of Hamburg and Havre, long since sub- - merged. This is not a prophecy, nor are the possibilities outlined so preposterous as at first glance they might up],ear. Many more marvellous metamorphoses have taken place in this hoary old world since it first began its circuit round the sun. Plato tells a story which is corroborated by a vast amount of circumstantial evidence at least as worthy of credence as expert medical testimony at a murder trial, of an island continent in the ocean off the entrance to the Mediterranean which wtis the cradle of civilization. Its people were the conquerors of Europe and Egypt, the colonisers of the Americas, th e progenitors of the Mound-builders and the Aztecs. This island, which Plato called Atlantis, with all its inhabitants, was swallowed by the sea at a single gulp in one drelul day and night. Then there are the British Isles which are proved by circumstantial evidence to have been, once upon a time, a part of the continent of Europe. The waves of the Atlantic, pounding ceaselessly away, at last gouged out a chfinnel through some low-lying lands between Dover and Calais and isolated the islands as a pack of wolves by patient manoeuvring might cut out a calf from aherd. And there is Australasia, which is but the remains of a once vast continent which was swallowed by the insatiable Winters.

such a fury that I,'lsle Derniere, ono of the prettiest of these islands, which had been occupied a« summer resort by the r.U-nest and oldest Creole families of New Orleans, was overwhelmed with all its inhabitants. Next div nothing but a mud bank, that has been covered at high tide ever since, realmineil to mark he spot where beautiful LTsle Derniero had been.

West of the mouth of the Mississippi the Gulf has upon the land from fifty to one hundred miles. Here there are neither quays nor their big brothers, the islands. One interesting evidence of the steady advance of the sin upon tho. southern coast was found by the engineers building the jetties at the month of the Mississippi. On Belize Bayou, a former outlet of the river, was an old Spanish fort built two hundred years before. When the engineers found it the water wins ten feet deep over the door-sill of tho magazine. Even if tho water had been level with the sill when it was laid, which isn't likely, the rate of subsidence must have been five feet a century. The magazine was level, and there was no cracks in the walls, showing that it was settling ovenly beliefltli the waters. -I.t continued to oink while it wins under observation during the building of tho jetties. But the most singular feature of the land around the mouth of the Mississippi is not that it is sinking but that it also stretches like wet rawhide. It is so elastic and untrustworthy that the jetty engineers could not maintain reliable bench murks, level heights and tide gauges for reference purposes. A carefully meas-

ured base line TOO feet- long was found to have stretched twelve feet in five years.

This subsidence of the coast, according to geologists, is caused by the great weight of tho detritus deposited uiion the edge of tho ocean floor by the great rivers. The Mississippi and its tributaries which are so thick with mud that their waters look as if they needed casters to enable them to run down hill, dump 400,000,000 tons of sediment on the edge of the Gulf ever year, which seems quite enough to tip up several states. Yet all the rivers of the world, and that includes tho Ganges, which in the average rainy season of 122 days carries six million cubic feet of earthy matter, a bul'k equal to forty of the pyramids of Egypt, do not transport enough sediment to fill up the sea to any appreciable extent. If an Englishman named Taylor made no mistake in his calculations all the detritus carried by all the rivers in tho world in ten thousand years would only make a layer three inches thick if it were spread evenly over the bottom of the sea. The rivers which empty into' the Atlantic are not so turbid as the Mississippi, yet they deposit an ever increasing load of detritus on the ocean floor near their mouths. They do not choke up their entrances because the bottom of the sea sinks as the mud accumulates. On the other side of the Atlantic

But leaving out of consideration circumstantial evidence, dug up by those who have nothing better to do .than to go nosing about trying to pry into Nature’s secrets, of transformations in prehistoric times, there still remain changes in modern coastlines great enough to be of more than ■passing interest. Some of the most striking of these changes are along our own water front.

tho coast line is retreating before tho ceaseless onslaught of the waves even more rapidly than here. Forty years ago the area of Great Britain was 56,964,260 acres; to-day the figures are 56,748,927 acres. Tho difference, 215,333 acres, represents the amount that has been swallowed by the sea. England alone has surrendered 524 square miles of her territory to the waves within the last thousand years. More recently the advance of the waters has been much more rapid, averaging for the last forty years 1,523 acres a year. The ravages of the sea in 1903 wore almost unprecedented.

Inaccuracy and exaggeration by engineers—.the fellows who drive tunnels from opposite sides of rivers ami mountains and make th e ends meet in tlie black bowels of the earth something less than a fraction of a hair’s breadth out of alignment—would be unthinkable, wouldn’t they? Well, the engineers of the United States Coast Survey who mapped the const of Long Beach for twelve mules south of Barnegat Inlet in 1839 found v upon going over the ground in 1871*that THE SEA IN THIRTY-TWO YEARS

MANY HISTORIC A I, TOWNS SUCH AS RAVENS BURGH, where Henry IV. landed in 1339, have been submerged. Off the coast of Yorkshire alone there are twelve submerged villages. Between Flamborugh Head and Kilnca 73,780 acres, an area equal to that of London, lias been devoured by the waves .since the Roman invasion. The erosion hero is so continuous that the outline of the coast is never the same on two consecutive days. On the Holderness coast, a stretch of forty miles, 1,904,000 tons of material aro washed away annually. Spurn Point is about- to be made an island.

had advanced inland au average of 5-15 feet for the entire distance, and in some places as much as 930 feet. Also they Found that beginning at the mouth of Dennis Creek in Cape May County the sea had swallowed 2310 feet of that stream and 1880 feet of East and West creeks. When the sea can exhibit an official record of progress at the mte of twentythree feet a year it almost becomes eligible to compete with some urban rapid transit systems. All this happened a generation ago? Yes, but just wait a minute. Dr. George H. Cook, formerly State Geologist of New Jersey, estimated that tlie coast of the State was subsiding at the rate of two feet a century, or a quarter of ail inch a year. The mean seaward slope of the coastnl plain being six feet to the mile, tliis would give a third of a mile per century as the rate of the sea’s encroachment upon tiie land. Dr. Cook being a mere geologist, engineers could not accept his unsupported statement about the rate of subsidence. So the United States coast survey established bench marks and put up self-registering tide gauges | to test the matter. This was the work of years, of course.

There is an anchorage off Selsey, Sussex, still called “The Park” because it was a royal deer park in the reign of Henry VIII. The Goqdwii sands, so much dreaded by navigators was the 4,000 acre estate of Ear' G

oothviiii until iit was inundated by a great wave in 1099. ' In June 1893, the sea advanced inland two hundred yards at Cromer during a single gale. Between Cromer and Happisburg, a stretch Of sixteen miles, the annual loss is twelve acres. All along the coast- the same process is going on continuously. The Shetland Islands, off the coast of Scotland, arc composed of very hard rocks; yet so violent is the action of the waves and currents that- what were once islands are mere clusters of rocks.

It is not necessary to be an engineer or even a geologist to be able to perceive that the sea is advancing upon the eastern and southern co'ists of the United States. Submerged stumps, some of them of trees cut down by man, and lagoons and marshes submerged all along the coast from New Jersey to Flordia within the memory of men now living and the decreasing power available lor mills and factories on tidal streams all tell the story of the advancing wafers. Then there are the quays which skirt the coast all (he wav !ironed I'Torida ami on lo Alabama. The quays are the high places on lands nut yet completely submerged. They are separated from the mainland by shallow sounds from a third

Neat- Slieringliam twenty feet of water now roll above a it!a('{■ where a cliff fifty feet' high with houses on i t stood a century ago. Minster church in Kent, two miles from the shore a century ago, is now on the beach. Once there was a deep indentation on tho coast of Kent, known as Horne Bay. The waves have whittled down the headlands until now there is a straight line where tho bay was. From 1872 to 1896, 1,300 feet were washed awa.v. Rceulver. between Herne Bay and Margate, in the Homan days was an important military post one mile from the sea. The town site is now under water. The coast of Sus- *•"" ring steadily worn away, f ’• 1 tracts of twenty to four

of a mile to five miles wide which ivere the low-lying lands which first succumbed to the onslaught -of the sea. West of Mobile Bat- the qunys have gotten out from ten to fifteen miles from the mainland where, being now quite beyond their depth, they are all drowned except a few of the largest which are now dignified by the name of islands., A TRAGIC INCIDENT in th:s .slow drowning of a continent occurred oil the night of August 10, 1850, when a sudden storm burst upon the Gulf, laehing- its waters to

acres go at once. At Lyme Regis the cliffs are worn away at the rate of. three feet a year. Near Penzance in Cornwall, St. Michael’s Mount, now an insular rock, once stood in a forest several miles from the sea. On the const of Wales the sea is advancing inland at the rate of six feet a year.

Ireland is also being rapidly dissolved into the ocean. In the southeast corner of Waterford County tho coast is ground away at the rate of eight feet a year, on tho average, but sometimes a single storm comes

along which takes away a slice ono hundred feet wide at. once. At Ardmore tho sea 'kept taking tho public highway as fast as it was laid out until at' last till attempts to keep a road open ailing ,Qio shoro was abandoned. The most serious aspect of this continuous shrinkage oi the United King(loin is tlint, there seems to bo NO WAY TO CHECK IT.

At Claiishaiinijik, Ireland, a sea, wall WHS built a dozen years ago, and promptly demolished. Since 411011 the sea has been allowed to take its course. Along the Holdorness const in England protective works .have beeq put up at a cost of 15,000. dollars a mile, which is three times the value of the land protected. At Bridlington it has cost 500,000 dollars to protect one mile of coast. When sea walls and groynes are put up at one point the waves simply redouble their efforts on the coast to leeward.

Of course the local authorities could not undertake to build a continuous lino of defences entirely around tlio British Isles. So tho poorer communities gave it up a couple of years ago, and appenled to tho National Government for help. After tho usual amount of preliminary talk anil memorials and addresses -a- 11 ova 1 Commission on Coast Erosion composed of thirteen members, with the Hon. Ivor C. Guest as chairman, was appointed a year ago. Tho Commission has not suffered from ennui since its appointment. The places which an ill greatest danger presented petitions for government aid and quoted decisions and precedents running back hundreds of years to prove it was tho King’s duty to guard tho coasts from tho attacks of Nature as zealously as he would from a mortal enemy. On tho o'thor hand, tho communities which have already .spent •large sums to protect tlioir own particular bits of coast are waging strenuous campaigns to convince the commission that they should not bo expected to chip in to help protect some other follow’s shores.

Across the English Channel tlio problem of saving the country from the sea is quito as serious as in England. Belgium spent 14,360,850 dollars for protection from the waves from 1902 to 1904 and is now preparing to build a sea wall along tho entire coast, fifty miles in extent, from France to Germany, literally forced to this huge undertaking. At Pont de Grave, on the left hank of the Gironde, France, the lighthouse has been moved three times to save it from the waves. Although 2,400,000 dollars have been spent on protective works the sea has eaten away a strip of coast 2,000 feet wide in this vicinity in the last seventyfive years. During a storm in December, 1904, 700,000 cubic metres of rock were engulfed at Cape de la Heve and a number of lives were lost. FIVE MILLION CUBIC METRES OF ROCK

are dissolved in the brine annually on the coast of Normandy. The National Government of France takes the comfortable position that- whi' the coast- belongs to the Nation, its protection is a matter for individual enterprise; and that where land is washed away the individual owner must stand the loss, while if any land

should be added by the action of the currents or the waves it belongs to the State. Under this agreeable arrangement. which also obtains in Belgium and Italy, those who are unfortunate enough to own land on the coast are not skimping, on their grocery hills to save money for coast protection. Germany is spending millions to check tho advance of the Baltic Sea upon the interior. The water front of Mecklenburg is melting away at tlie average rate of eight feet a year with an occasional spurt in a severe storm. The erosion is very rapid on the coast' of Schleswig. Heligoland, which in tho eleventh century was" an island with an area of 570 square miles, is now reduced to a mere rock ono and a half miles long and two thousand feet wide. Wangcnroog, a large and populous island sixty-five years ago, is now an abandoned mud bank. Eleven-twelfths of the island of Nordstraiul has been ground away by the attrition of the waves, and the rest is going fast. There is forty feet of water where the centre ol the island used to he, and of the twenty-four isles which once surrounded it. none remains.

Holland, which was chiefly stolen front the sea, and where people by the hundred thousand have been drowned repeatedly in inundations in the !-?t sixteen hundred years, still threatens to return to its former stale. Careful measurements made by tlie DiC 'll Government show that in the lasi, half century the loss of beatb in the north of Holland Inis been a strip of an average of 156 feet, and in the south of Holland 108 feet. The coast is subsiding ait the rate of four inches to thirty inches a century. A catastrophe was narrowly missed in December, 1894, when an unusually high tide driven o.i by a gale broke through the sandhills. Katwyk, once far from the

s a, is now on the shore. Ait Sche-v-.mingeii, where half the village was overwhelmed by the sea in 1570, a church once, in the middle of the Cavil is now on the beach. Several oilier villages which appeared on the imps of 1571 are now three-quarters of a mile out to sea. Greenland is subsiding, and even Australia is being worn away so much that the scanty population of the island continent is obliged to c instruct expensive works on all sides t.i protect its seaports. Still, this gloomy picture of des'motion need arouse no apprehensions in the hrilists of the present generation. Taking it by land large it will he several thousand years, " Inch is plenty long enough for our immediate interests, before Mother Fa nth will find it necessary to hang oat the sign “Standing Boom Only.”