Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 December 1879 — The End of the World. [ARTICLE]

The End of the World.

Camilla Flammarion, the well-known French scientist, thus expresses himself in La Correspondence Scientifique regarding the ultimate of our globe: The earth was born; she will die either of old age, when her vital elements shall have been used up, or through the extinction of the sud, to whose rays her life is suspended. She might also die by accident through collision with some celestial body meeting her on her route; but this end of the world is the most improbable of all. She may, we repeat, die a natural death through the slow absorption of her vital elements. In fact, it is probable that the air and water are diminishing. The ocean, like the atmosphere, appears to have been formerly much more considerable than it is in our day. The terrestrial crust is penetrated by waters which combine chemically with the rocks. It is almost certain that the temperature of the interior of the globe reaches that of boiling water at a depth of about six miles, and prevents the water from descending any lower. But the absorption will continue with the cooling of the globe. The oxygen, nitrogen and carbonic acid which compose our atmosphere also appear to undergo absorption, but slower. The thinker may foresee, through the mist of ages to come, the epoch, yet afar off, in which the earth, deprived of the atmospheric aqueous vapor which protects her from the glacial cold of space by preserving the solar rays around her, will become chilled in the sleep of death. As Henry Vivarez says: “ From the summit of the mountains a winding sheet of snow will descend upon the high plateaus and the valleys, driving before it life and civilization, and masking forever the cities and nations that it meets on its passage. Life and human activity will press insensibly toward the intertropical zone. St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna, Constantinople and Rome will fall asleep in succession under their eternal shroud. During very many ages equatorial humanity will undertake Arctic expeditions to find again under the ice the place of Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. The sea coasts will have changed, and the geographical map of the earth will have been transformed. No one will live and breathe any more except in the equatorial zone up to the day when the last family, nearly dead with cold and hunger, will sit on the Bhore of the last sea, in the rays of the sun which will thereafter shine here below on an ambulent tomb revolving aimlessly around a ageless light and a barren heat.”