A NEW DANGER. The Relationship Between Natural Gas and the End of the World.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 165, 14 August 1886, Page 4

A NEW DANGER. The Relationship Between Natural Gas and the End of the World.

Recent events furnish ground for a new and very plausible theory in regard to the burning of the world, a theory that attributes the conflagration to well-known natural agencies— agencies which threaten to get beyond human contral, and by which the world, and possibly the universe, may be destroyed, not only in our time but in tlie course of a few years, or even months. It will be remembered that in the past year what is known aa '" natural gaa" has come into very' general u?e in parts' of' Pennsylvania. This gas is obtained by boring through the surface of the earth into • cavities where the gas has been stored by the processes of nature, and whence 1 it escapes into the upper air as soon as an outlet is offered. Gas wells have been discovered in Ohio, New Mexico, and California, and will doubtless, like oil wells, be discovered in many localities, perhaps in Europe or Asia a^ well as in this country. When we have a circle of gas wells extend- I ing from Pennsylvania through the Ohio ] Valley to the Missouri Valley, then to the Pacific, and via Alaska and Behring Straits to Siberia, and on through Russia in Europe to Germany, and even England, who knows what may happen ? Even' when with the few wells now running, what weuld occur if the fire by some chance could be conveyed to the great gas wells iri the bowels of the earth ? Might not the sea be dried up, and the mountains hurled 1 from their foundations 1 Indeed, might not the earth be blown to fragments— converted, so, to spaak, into decisions of incendiary rockets, for extending the conflagration to the rest of the universe ! Who knows ? ,