On a Possible Reversal of Deep-Sea Circulation and Its Influence on Geologic Climates

Abstract

The control of secular climates is obviously a condition prerequisite to biologic continuity. The preservation of a narrow range of temperature and a limited variation of atmospheric constituents throughout the millions of years of the biologic past was absolutely essential to organic evolution. Continued preservation for millions of years to come seems equally a condition precedent to an intellectual and spiritual evolution commensurate with the physical and biological evolutions that have preceded it. Only such a prolonged evolution of the intellectuality now just dawning gives full moral satisfaction to our conception of the sum-total of terrestrial history. The narrowness of the range to which temperatures must be confined to permit progressive organic and intellectual evolution takes on its true meaning only when we recall that the natural temperature range on the earth's surface is sixteen times as great as this, while that affecting the solar family is at least sixty times as great. For a hundred million years, more or less, this narrow range of temperature has been maintained quite without break of continuity, unless geologists and biologists are altogether in error in their inductions. On the further maintenance of this continuity hang future interests of transcendent moment.