Miles Of Water Research Articles

Küresel Su Stresi ve Ölçüm Yöntemleri

Dünyada yaklaşık 332,5 milyon kübik mil sudan oluşan su kaynaklarının %96’sı okyanus ve denizleri içeren tuzlu su kaynaklarıdır. Geriye kalan %4’lük tatlı su kaynaklarının %68’i buzullarda sıkışmış halde bulunurken, %30’u ise toprak altı suyu olarak yer almaktadır. Kullanılabilir su kaynaklarının doğal nedenlerle bu kadar az olmasının yanı sıra; sanayileşme ve kentleşmenin yarattığı çevre kirliliği, sera gazı emisyonlarının sürekli ve önemli ölçüde artması sonucu oluşan küresel ısınma kaynaklı kuraklık ve yağış rejimlerinde görülen değişiklikler ile geometrik olarak artan nüfus gibi beşeri faktörler kişi başına düşen temiz su miktarının daha da azalmasına yol açmaktadır. Su, kıtlık derecesi giderek artan bir doğal kaynakken, özellikle az gelişmiş ülkelerde yaşanan yoksulluk, bu ülkelerde yaşayan insanların suya erişimini iyice zorlaştırmaktadır. Bu çalışmada ele alınan veriler, dünyanın özellikle 2030 ve sonrasında çok daha ciddi bir su sorunu ile karşı karşıya kalacağını göstermektedir. Çalışmanın öncelikli amacı, dünyada su stresini ölçen önemli indekslerden biri olan ‘Su Yoksulluğu İndeksi’ (Water Poverity Index-WPI) ile ilgili olarak ülkemizdeki literatür eksikliğinin giderilmesine katkı sağlamaktır. Söz konusu eksikliğin giderilmesi, özellikle bizim gibi su stresi yaşayan ülkelerde gerekli bilimsel çalışmaların yapılarak, politika yapıcılar ve toplum nezdinde konu ile ilgili farkındalığı artırmak açısından oldukça önemlidir. Ayrıca, gelecekte tartışmaya açılması muhtemel görünen su karnesi uygulamasına gerek duyulmaması için, suyun geleceği adına, neler yapabileceğimizi bir kez daha gözden geçirmek yine bu çalışmanın amacını oluşturmaktadır.

ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT OF AN ESTUARY AT THE EDGE OF THE AMERICAN CARIBBEAN: BISCAYNE BAY

Biscayne Bay is a shallow subtropical estuary, 225 square miles of water, at the edge of the tropics, located within Dade County, one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S.A. The fragility of this seagrass and mangrove dominated estuary has been demonstrated by repeated destruction of these ecosystems by man's activities, such as dredging, filling, drainage, sewerage, thermal pollution, and others. At the southern end, the U.S. Department of the Interior has recently established the Biscayne Monument, a preserve area where fairly rigit restrictions for man's use of the biota are enforced. At the northern end, intense land development since 1910 along with establishment for artificial islands and causeways, bulkheading, sewerage outfall and other pollutants has altered the ecology greatly. Approximately 1.5 million people inhabit this area. Multiple authorities for regulating use in the bay and its shoreline exist ranging from county to Federal. Many problems of overlapping jurisdiction and enforcement occur. Two symposia to bring together the knowledge of processes occurring m the bay and to delineate a policy for managing the bay were held in March 1976 resulting in the Volume, Biscayne Bay: Past, Present, and Future. Aspects of the ecology of this bay and of the management problems and goals will be discussed.

Nature's compass: the mystery of animal navigation

The mysterious and remarkable ways that animals navigate We know that animals cross miles of water, land, and sky with pinpoint precision on a daily basis. But it is only in recent years that scientists have learned how these astounding feats of navigation are actually accomplished. With colorful and thorough detail, Nature's Compass explores the remarkable methods by which animals find their way both near home and around the globe. Noted biologist James Gould and popular science writer Carol Gould delve into the elegant strategies and fail-safe backup systems, the invisible sensitivities and mysterious forces, and incredible mental abilities used by familiar and rare species, as they investigate a multitude of navigation strategies, from the simple to the astonishing. The Goulds discuss how animals navigate, without instruments and training, at a level far beyond human talents. They explain how animals measure time and show how the fragile monarch butterfly employs an internal clock, calendar, compass, and map to commence and measure the two-thousand-mile annual journey to Mexico—all with a brain that weighs only a few thousandths of an ounce. They look at honey bees and how they rely on the sun and mental maps to locate landmarks such as nests and flowers. And they examine whether long-distance migrants, such as the homing pigeon, depend on a global positioning system to let them know where they are. Ultimately, the authors ask if the disruption of migratory paths through habitat destruction and global warming is affecting and endangering animal species. Providing a comprehensive picture of animal navigation and migration, Nature's Compass decodes the mysteries of this extraordinary aspect of natural behavior.

Lake Missoula and Its Floods

The city of Spokane lies astride the Spokane River, some 40 miles from its origination near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The convention center and hotel, site of the 65th annual meeting of SRM, are located right along the river, creating a beautiful and even idyllic setting. These qualities make it even harder to imagine a long-ago day when a miles-wide wall of water, measuring as much as 500 feet high, bore down on this site. Hours before, a great ice dam on glacial Lake Missoula (present-day Clark Fork River) had failed. The dam was as much as 2,500 feet in height, impounded a lake up to 2,000 feet deep, extended east in the intermontane valleys for 200 miles, and covered some 3,000 square miles. It probably contained over 500 cubic miles of water, approximating half the volume of Lake Michigan. It is now generally agreed that catastrophic fl oods, in accordance with prevailing ice age conditions, repeatedly issued from Lake Missoula, probably on the order of several tens of times. Geologists estimate that the latest and last of the fl oods occurred about 13,000 years ago, creating the observable effects on the ground today, while largely obscuring the effects of earlier fl oods. Most students of the fl oods support that this particular event and its effects should be named “Bretz’s Flood” after the early geologist J Harlen Bretz, who fi rst recognized in 1919 the effects of catastrophic fl ooding on the Columbia drainage of southeastern Washington, as well as the Columbia River Gorge, the Portland-Vancouver Basin, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Over the 2 million years of the last ice age, four major glaciations advanced into what is now the northwestern United States. The last of these, the Wisconsin glaciation, left clear evidence of its effects, while likely obscuring most of the evidence of earlier fl ooding. It is near-certain, however, that each of the many fl oods inundated thousands of square miles in what is now central and southeastern Washington to depths of hundreds of feet. Later study also showed that the many fl oods likely shared the same provenance, that is, the same cause and effect. Piecing together the available evidence, it appears that the full glacial climate was cold and dry, with strong winds that redistributed soil materials to the southeastern quadrant of the Columbia Basin. These processes created what is today called the Palouse, an area of wind-deposited silts (loess) over the underlying basalt that had literally oozed out of the earth over previous untold centuries. The winds created dune-like deposits of variable orientation and depth that today make up fertile farmland in southeastern Washington and adjacent Idaho. Bretz’s Flood followed the path of the many earlier fl oods and recreated the effects over thousands of square miles in the Columbia Basin. These can briefl y be considered in four major categories: 1) the channeled scablands, 2) the river canyon, 3) the Grand Coulee, and 4) Lake Lewis.

Stalwart Giants: Medical Cosmopolitanism, Canadian Authorship, and American Publishers

Stalwart GiantsMedical Cosmopolitanism, Canadian Authorship, and American Publishers Jennifer J. Connor (bio) “Nationalism,” declared Dr. William Osler in 1902, “has been the great curse of humanity.” For this internationally revered Canadian physician, the profession of medicine transcends borders: it is a “sort of guild or brotherhood, any member of which can take up his calling in any part of the world” and can find identical language and methods. Philadelphia-based Lea Brothers, publisher of Osler’s 1907 edited collection, Modern Medicine, echoed his many statements on this theme: “A new era has come in medicine, the age of cosmopolitanism,” they wrote in a preface. “As in finance and trade, the world has become a single country.”1 Indeed, medical book publishing itself had long—perhaps always—targeted a borderless market. At the same time, however, American medical publishers clearly dominated the market by the late nineteenth century. For, as the prominent medical editor Dr. George M. Gould observed in 1897, although “science is cosmopolitan; medicine is most patriotic when least selfish; we know naught of geographic limits or national boundary lines; [and] our colleagues over sea are our brethren none the less because miles of water lie between us,” American books raised nevertheless “a pardonable patriotism in which we may indulge.” Of all the methods to counter a reported condescension among “foreigners” toward the American medical profession, Gould asked, “what one is more effective than the creation of a good book?”: “Now I think no one will deny the assertion that we Americans have a marked superiority to some other nations in the art of scientific and artistic book-making. Every book of superior professional and typographic excellence we send across the water raises us as a profession and as a nation in the eyes of our transatlantic colleagues.”2 This superiority of production, and a lucrative specialized trade in medical books, in fact made American medical publishers attractive to authors. Philadelphia was the main center for this trade, and as will be discussed [End Page 209] here, it was central not just for the United States, but for the North American continent. Anglo-Canadian physicians, trained in elite British and Canadian medical schools (which, unlike the situation in the United States, generally were university-based or -affiliated from their establishment in the early nineteenth century), gravitated to the northeast part of the United States to lead and participate in the new research culture in medicine at the end of the nineteenth century. The medical profession then was mobilizing: professionalizing, specializing, researching, writing, publishing, and organizing libraries. The most significant Canadian expatriate was Dr. (later Sir) William Osler, who in 1893 helped to found what was to become the model for medical schools at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and who would move on to Oxford in 1905, exemplifying the cosmopolitan physician in the Anglo-American world par excellence. Consequently, although Osler publicly decried nationalism, he and his fellow Canadian expatriate authors knew well that a large Canadian influence was exerted on American medical publishers, and they quietly applauded it. Publishers knew it well, too. “The United States is often said to be a chauvinist country,” observed a centennial history of the (Philadelphia-based) publisher, Saunders Company, but in its use of textbooks in the basic medical sciences it has been above all else eclectic. For many years the Grant Atlas of Anatomy, the Best and Taylor Physiology, and Boyd’s Pathology, all by Canadian authors, were stalwart giants that every publisher wanted to topple from their lofty place, but none could. There are other Canadian texts too of profound influence on medicine everywhere, and Saunders has had the good fortune to publish more than its fair share of them. They include the Fraser and Paré Diagnosis of Diseases of the Chest, the Thompson and Thompson Medical Genetics, the Leeson and Leeson Histology, Bates, Macklem and Christie on Respiratory Function in Disease, the Cherniack and Cherniack Respiration in Health and Disease and Moore’s The Developing Human.3 These connections between Canadian authors and American publishers thus invite fuller investigation, not just to understand contemporary notions of nationalism and continentalism, but also to shed new light on the...

Orchids and Eagles, and: After a Sung Dynasty Scroll by Hsiao Chio, and: The Return of the Hunters, and: The Kitchen Bird, and: The Island without Tourists, and: Just Once, and: Waiting for the Alchemist

Orchids and Eagles, and: After a Sung Dynasty Scroll by Hsiao Chio, and: The Return of the Hunters, and: The Kitchen Bird, and: The Island without Tourists, and: Just Once, and: Waiting for the Alchemist Mark Perlberg Orchids and Eagles Something happened to the cables that run under miles of water to our island, so we play cribbage in the light of six candles and a hurricane lamp. I look up from my cards. In the black window opposite, the assortment of candles and the lamp float in the glass, and I am back in the dining room of a hotel in Morelia. Tall white candles and white orchids float in a wall of wood-framed windows above the valley, mingled with pricks of light from the old city— images that have not risen to mind for thirty years. What is memory? Praise it. Praise its strings and loops of orchids floating in the night above the old Mexican town— and yesterday—that pair of eagles, drifting, floating above the island, dallying with the wind. [End Page 66] After a Sung Dynasty Scroll by Hsiao Chio The great crag fills the sky. Three waterfalls drop from cliffs without a sound. Trails wind through trees. They ascend, disappear, and reappear. A placid river flows at the mountain's base, where a servant ties a flat-bottomed boat to a landing. He has ferried over a pair of sages, with their topknots and dark crimson robes. They talk about The Mandate of Heaven and read their poems to each other. Near the summit, temple buildings, their roofs curved up like wings, stand half hidden behind walls and groves of pine. Has the boatman ferried the men past the world's edge? Is this the country beyond death? The Return of the Hunters after the painting by Brueghel They enter the scene under a gray, mottled sky with their dogs. They have reached the crest of a snowy hill above their village after a day of hard slogging. Dark birds brood on iron-cold branches. Below, skaters thrust and turn on a frozen pond. [End Page 67] How many times have I looked at this translation of a world and failed to notice the hunters' game bags are empty? Even the dogs are dejected. Winter will be endless. The Kitchen Bird Above our stove a Persian bird flies on a Persian tile in a surround of stalks and flowers, some blue like his wings, some like his breast cinnamon-rose. His beak is open; he stares straight up. This is the way he greets each morning. Singing. The Island without Tourists Vinalhaven, Maine 1 Late September. No more sunsets of lavender, pale green, rose, soft gray. The west red-orange like a furnace. [End Page 68] No lights from neighboring houses. The full moon bright enough to turn the islet below, each pointed spruce, upside down in the flat-calm bay. 2 Bright morning. Wind rushes in treetops. aerial surf swoops, roughs my hair, sizzles in my ears. My own sound in the mix— big shoes on gravel. It's all music. Just Once I have never seen my father in a dream. He died when I was five. A scrap of memory washed in browns and grays is all I retain. If I could see him just once in my night theater, what would he say to his second son at last? [End Page 69] Waiting for the Alchemist The October sun fires late chrysanthemums, garnet, lavender, bright yellow. It strikes an antique dollhouse set down on the stump of an elm. A wicker bell tolls. In my back garden at five in the afternoon, my shadow's a hundred feet long. If I squint sidewise, just so, at the white sun on a day like this, I might uncover the philosopher's stone...

FLOWING WATER RESOURCES1

ABSTRACTUsing data related to stream order and the morphological characteristics associated with streams of different discharge rates, an estimate of the river resources of the United States is made. The national totals are: 3,200,000 miles total length of rivers; 15,000 square miles of river surface; and 29 cubic miles of water stored in river channels. Using the same techniques, more exact estimates may be made for individual river basins. Suggestions are given for application of the techniques and river data in the management of water resources.

What's in the Ocean?

THE WORLD'S OCEAN basins are filled with approximately 330 million cubic miles of seawater. This great volume contains almost unimaginable amounts of dissolved materials, some very precious. For example, over 8 billion tons of gold reside in the sea; and if all the water were magically removed, about 50 quadrillion tons of salt, enough to cover the exposed land of the Earth to a depth of 500 feet, would remain. It is a little easier to imagine a single cubic mile of seawater, but it is still impressive to list its dissolved contents: 150 million tons of salts including 120 million tons of sodium chloride (table salt), 8 million tons of magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt), 250 thousand tons of bromine, 60 thousand tons of strontium, 45 tons of silver, 25 tons of gold, about an ounce of radium, and smaller amounts of nickel, copper, uranium, lead, zinc, and manganese. A more formal look at seawater shows that some are present in abundance, others in lesser amounts. The chemicals are thus divided into major and minor groups, the former being constant in their relation to one another, the latter varying more widely from time to time and place to place. In table 1, the numbers are given in more useful units, milligrams per kilogram, or parts per million. Manganese, copper, zinc, lead, selenium, cesium, and uranium range from 0.001 to 0.01 parts per million. Molybdenum, thorium, celurium, silver, vanadium, lanthanum, yttrium, and nickel all range from 0.0005 to 0.0001 ppm. Scientium, mercury, gold, radium, cadmium, cobalt, tin, and about 40 other are included as trace elements in seawater. Most of the combine with others to form countless numbers of compounds dissolved in the sea or precipitated in its sediments. Many can be detected only as they are concentrated by certain organisms. Although all natural are present in seawater, some obviously are in very low concentration. Nevertheless, each year about 2 million tons of uranium go past Key West, Florida in the Florida Current which, while flowing at just two and a half knots, represents 30 million cubic meters of water going by every second. The overall salinity of the open ocean ranges from 33 to 37 parts per thousand near the surface where evaporation and rain exert their greatest influence. Salinity may drop even lower near land due to run-off and the entry of rivers. But in general, the salinity of the ocean is fairly constant at 35 parts per thousand. This means that there are 35 grams of dissolved solids of all kinds present in each liter of seawater. Of the salts present, 89% are chlorides, 10% are sulfates, and 0.02% are carbonates. The least saline part of the sea is the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland where there is so much fresh melt-water and river water entering, that the salinity at times is near zero. On the other hand, the saltiest part of the sea is the Red Sea where so much water is evaporated by the sun and dry air that the remainder has a salinity of 41 parts per thousand. Although it is not presently part of the world ocean, it is interesting for comparison to note that Great Salt Lake, Utah has a salinity up to 280 parts per thousand. But even with all this, perhaps the most important component of seawater is the water itself. The world ocean contains 97% of the Earth's total water supply. Another 1% is in the atmosphere, and the remaining 2% is found in ground water and frozen in the ice caps. Presently, about 6 million cubic miles of water are locked in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, but during ice ages much more water was in such cold storage and sea levels were much lower than they are today. Now, as the ice caps continue to melt in our warming atmosphere, the sea level is gradually rising. In past interglacial periods, it has been much higher than it is today.

Offshore Boundary Disputes in Southeast Asia

The seventh session of the Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea has just ended after three months (28 March to 19 May, and 22 August to 15 September 1978). There seems to be general agreement that territorial waters should be extended from the traditional 3-mile limit out to 12 miles (19 kilometres) offshore, and that every coastal state is entitled to an economic zone reaching 200 miles. More than 40 countries have established, or are in the process of establishing, 200 miles (320 kilometres) offshore as a fishery zone, economic zone, or territorial sea. To many states, the 200-mile economic zone is already a fact of international law. But there is still some disagreement over how much control coastal states should exercise over the adjacent 200 miles of water.

Deep sea buoy anchored in Gulf of Mexico

The first of a series of advanced experimental buoys for automatically gathering oceanographic and meteorological data from the marine environment is now stationed in the Gulf of Mexico.The 100‐ton buoy is anchored in almost two miles of water about 225 miles from Gulfport, Mississippi. It is scheduled to remain on site through 1974, transmitting environmental data.

Submarine Attacks on the Pacific Coast, 1942

Barbara, California. Signalman Takeo Aiba, a veteran of eight years' service in the Imperial Navy, took his station with the other lookouts on the conning tower and scanned the waters. Several miles behind lay Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands; ahead, beyond ten or twelve miles of water, lay the low coastal Santa Inez Mountains. Minutes later, the captain climbed onto the bridge. Commander Nishino, a respected submariner, looked about for aircraft and signs of ominous weather. There being neither, he shouted an order below, and nine ratings clambered up the ladder and onto the deck. These men comprised the gun crew. Their mission was to bombard American national soil, the first foreign power to do so since the Mexican War. The idea of shelling territory of the continental United States was by this time not especially novel to the Imperial Navy, but the sensation it created with the American people was something else. Plans, ultimately cancelled, had called for submarine attacks on the west coast after Pearl Harbor, and before 1942 was over, submarine 1-25 would deliver two more such attacks. These daring raids, despite their negligible results, created a nationwide stir. Submarine I-17 was several thousand miles from the United States in mid-October, 1941, on a training cruise in the Bungo Strait north of Kyushu, southernmost of the Japanese home islands. Ordered into Saeki, the ship provisioned for an extensive training cruise that would be aborted by the Japanese decision to commence hostilities. On November 15, it departed Kyushu waters and patrolled off the Nampo Shoto Islands until the 24th. The Japanese war plans were then accelerated, and 1-17 was ordered to set course for Ha-

Ruffed Grouse Flight Capability over Water

Game bird flight capabilities have received little attention, undoubtedly because this aspect of behavior usually has little bearing on species management. As Leopold (1933) points out, this knowledge is important only when it is desirable or necessary to eliminate interchange between different isolated populations. The Michigan Department of Conservation recently established ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) on several Great Lakes islands (Ammann and Palmer, 1958). In most cases wild, live-trapped grouse were used to establish populations. On one island we have attempted to establish a population of diseasefree hand-reared birds. We obviously hope that each population remains isolated from the others. Since some of our islands are separated by only 1 mile of water, the question naturally arose regarding the distance ruffed grouse can fly. This paper reports the results of tests performed to ascertain the flight capabilities of grouse over water. It also sheds light on some contributing factors affecting distribution of animals on islands. Compared with most birds, those in the superfamily Phasianoidea are relatively sedentary. No species, for example, is migratory. However, several species in this superfamily are, if necessary, capable of quite long single flights. Prairie grouse, including prairie chicken (Tympanuchus cupido), sharp-tailed grouse (Pediocetes phasianellus), and red grouse (Lagopus scoticus) are examples of powerful fliers, and reportedly are capable of flights of several miles (Leopold, 1933). Data on ruffed grouse flight capabilities are particularly scanty. Perhaps this is understandable. Because of the bird's habitat requirements and its tendency to fly toward denser cover when flushed, few firsthand observations have been made of long flights. It would seem logical to derive further insight into ruffed grouse flight capability by analyzing origins of populations on islands. Bump, et al. (1947) used this approach and apparently concluded that flights over several miles of water are possible. As regards islands referred to by these authors, this conclusion is tenable, but my familiarity with grouse distribution on Michigan's Great Lakes islands makes me suspicious of such circumstantial evidence. Along the shoreline of Michigan's Great Lakes, ruffed grouse are absent from islands more than a half mile from the mainland. To our knowledge ruffed grouse have populated only Grand Island in Lake Superior, and Sugar and Neebish Islands in St. Mary's River between Lakes Superior and Huron. These islands are about :/2 mile from shore. All of our other islands, including Drummond, which lies only 1 mile from the eastern tip of the Upper Peninsula, had no ruffed grouse prior to recent introductions. This evidence, contrary to the opinion offered by Bump, et al. (1947), suggests that long-distance flights are unlikely. I decided to test-fly several grouse by releasing them from a boat at considerable distances from shore. I wish to thank the following biologists of the Michigan Department of Conservation for their assistance in the tests: Thomas Prawdzik, Peter F. Olsen, Jerry Duvendeck, Herbert Johnson, and John Kadlec. I also appreciated C. T. Black's comments and suggestions on presentation of this report.

Precise Surveys for Mackinac Bridge

A brief description is given of the magnitude of the project and the surveying problems involved. Equipment and methods used to established a major triangulation net on land; a minor triangulation net of six sea towers for locating piers; and vertical control across approximately four miles of water is described.

Home-made Hydrography

This paper sets out to describe some of the ways in which merchant seamen may make useful sketch surveys of anchorages, coastlines or even whole islands, so as to improve the official charts, plans and sailing directions in areas which lack complete surveys by naval surveyors. These areas in fact include hundreds of miles of coastline, and hundreds of square miles of water where the depths are dangerously uncertain. The paper also describes some unorthodox uses of the official charts and, finally, attempts to show the usefulness of these improvements. All the work described has been done in the south-west Pacific, among the islands of Melanesia, where good surveys are few, and the gaps are filled in with scraps of early surveys.

Exploring the Bed of the Ocean

THE earth has, for very good reasons, been called the water planets About 140 million square miles, or more than 70 per cent of the globe, are covered with water, and more than 90 million square miles of water has a depth exceeding 2,000 fathoms. No part of the eath's solid crust is less accessible to scientific investigations than the floor of the ocean. No part, on June other hand, offers a greater variety of unsolved problems. In our days, when both the north ane the south poles have been reached, the deserts.of central Asia, the primeval forests of Africa and of South America, and the barren ice-fields of Greenland and the antarctic continent have been explored, the last remaining white area on the world map is the ocean floor.

Unusual currents in Glacial Lake Missoula, Montana

The area submerged by Glacial Lake Missoula includes several intermontane basins and constricted interconnecting valleys or “narrows” that drain to a single outlet, the Clark Fork River. A sudden failure of the ice dam that blocked this valley, near the Idaho-Montana State line, caused unusually large and rapid currents through the narrows and wind gaps in the partly submerged rim of Camas Prairie basin. Evidences of such currents include commensurate, but otherwise ordinary, effects of streams confined to rocky channels and the unique giant ripple marks. At its high stage the lake is roughly estimated to have held more than 500 cubic miles of water of which nearly three-fourths was stored above a constricted part of the Clark Fork Valley called the Eddy Narrows. Calculations based on available incomplete data indicate a flow through the Eddy Narrows that reached a maximum of 9.46 cubic miles per hour. Whether the lake was completely drained at that time has not been determined, but a later set of beaches testifies that the basin held a lake soon after the rapid outflow. Apparently the final draining was gradual.

Water‐intake of saturated soils

In his profound work “Data of geochemistry” Clarke accepts the estimate that of the total of about 337,000,000 cubic miles of water within the hydrosphere of the Earth, 29,347 cubic miles falls as precipitation on the land‐area and 6,524 cubic miles returns to the oceans as stream‐flow annually [see 1 of references at end of paper]. Thus it appears that less than 0.002 per cent of the Earth's capital of water takes part in the ocean‐land‐ocean circulation. It is this small fraction of the Earth's store of water that has performed wonders throughout the sedimentary history of the Earth. It has been responsible for Nature's public works in sculpturing continents as they emerged from the oceans time after time throughout the ages.

Commercial Aviation in the American Mediterranean

O NE of the great advantages of the airplane as compared with ground transport is the possibility of using it over land and water. There are, of course, different types of planes for flying over land and for flying over water; but whereas seaplanes are rather infrequently used on short overland portions of airways and amphibians are seen on only a few airlines, day by day landplanes fly over a considerable number of miles of water. On routes with scheduled air services the distances to be flown over water by landplanes are generally small:1 it is, however, just such a connection that causes annoyance and additional expense when ground transport only is used. If you travel, or ship goods, from San Francisco to Bucarest, it will generally be of no great importance that you, or your goods, twice have to change the means of transport, but between London and Brussels the matter assumes a different aspect. In some cases expensive engineering works have been undertaken to secure, so far as possible, unbroken land or water passage on important traffic routes; for example, the viaduct to Key West, the Hindenburg Dike to the Isle of Sylt, the new bridge over the Little Belt, and the Panama, Welland, Suez, and Kiel Canals. There is no need for such constructions in transport aviation. Now there are certain regions where the interpenetration of land and water assumes especially large proportions and where, therefore, the plane may best show its superiority over ground transport. These regions are the European, Australasian, and American Mediterraneans, which together have an area about one and one half times that of the United States. To this area must be added a certain portion of the adjacent continents; for the water surfaces do not create any traffic, they only carry it: they are the deserts or voids to be bridged between the land regions, which furnish the objects of traffic. There is not only a hydrological but also a traffic catchment area of the Mediterraneans, the extent of which, however, would be difficult to evaluate. Within the M[editerraneans the distribution of land and water is of prime importance for transport aviation; for peninsulas, islands, and archipelagoes are not only outliers of the trafficcreating continents but also most useful steppingstones, reducing the over-water distances to be bridged by nonstop flights. Instead

Pheneus and the Pheneatiké

At three o'clock on the afternoon of July 6th, 1901, I stood at the extreme edge of the col between Mount Skipieza and Mount Saïta, staring with a mixture of incredulity, irritation, and interest at the scene before me. Where I had expected to see the lake of Pheneus, a blue expanse of twenty-five square miles of water, there lay a fertile stretching plain, for the most part a blaze of golden corn, while here and there a white point of light shewed where a fustanella'd harvester was at his peaceful toil. Nearer, the corn gave place to an ugly foreground of sun-cracked clay, while just at my feet, stretching from side to side of the narrowing valley, lay a mere ribbon of slate-coloured water—all that is left of the lake of Pheneus to-day.I knew that such changes in its condition had been noted by travellers from Pausanias downwards, but this last and I believe final disappearance of the historic lake seems to have passed without notice in Athens and elsewhere.

The Light of Planets

A FEW facts relative to this subject may be interesting. At Plymouth on August 12, about 9 o'clock, favoured with a beautifully clear horizon, the brilliancy of Mars was so great that it cast a distinctly black shadow on a piece of white paper from an ordinary walking stick held at a distance of 4½ inches; the outline of the hand, under the same conditions, was also easily perceptible. A faint, yet decided, darkening of the white cliffs of the shore was caused by a person standing upright—the slope being about 45°. The point of observation was at the extreme north-west of the Sound, and the splendour of the planet's light reflected from three or four miles of water is perhaps unrivalled.