NIAGARA IS MOVING

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 792, 12 October 1929, Page 30

NIAGARA IS MOVING

Everybody. who hasn’t seen Niagara Falls should by all means go at once —even if the excursion rates are not on. For after a while' it will be too late. . The falls are moving away. They are going upstream. We can’t do anything to stop it, and it is only a question of time before the railway station will have to be moved back if passengers for the falls are to be delivered f.o.b. at that interesting spot. And it’s only a matter of some more years before the whole show will be over with and done for good. Now is the time to take a look at it. Of course, all of us know that a lot of water spills over on its way to the St. Lawrence, but mosts of us are satisfied that there is plenty more where it came from, and don’t give much though to the quantity running by. It is, however, satisfyingly large. Around 41,000,000 tons of it tumbles round the brink every GO minutes. And that, as the mathematically inclined have doubtless already observed, is the equivalent of an inch of rain on just 410,0000 acres of ground. It takes that much raining to work the falls for only one hour, not allowing for any to soak into the dirt. A good hard rain on some G4O-odd square miles would do the trick, but it would be no drizzle. Downpour would be better. Now all that water is fine aud inspiring to think about, but it Is chewing off the face of the cliff, according to Sir Charles 1 J ill’s figures, at the rate of a foot a year—maybe more—and if this keeps on we can expect the big show to move upstream about a mile every fifty centuries. It has already backed up toward Lake Erie, as this eminent author points out, about seven miles or so, taking a mere 35,000 years for the trip. So now’s the time —and, besides, it’s well worth seeing.