Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 October 1884 — The Gulf of Mexico and Its Stream. [ARTICLE]

The Gulf of Mexico and Its Stream.

At the American Science Association in Philadelphia, Prof. J.E. Hilgardread a paper on the “Relative Level of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.” He exhibited a relief model, showing the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the United States, east of the Mississippi River. The principal feature to which he directed attention was the fact that the actual continental outline does not correspond to the present accidental limits of land and water, but to the onehundred fathom curve, so that the continental limit is far out under the sea. Florida and Yucatan have more than twice their geological limits, while the West Indies and the Antilles appear as a vast submarine continuation of the Florida peninsula, the mountain summits of which only appear above the sea, extending to the southeast, forms, with the coast line of the United States, a great bight nearly as large again as the Gulf of Mexico, which Prof. Hilgard designated the Great Bay of North America. Whatever the causes which produced the gulf stream, they must give rise to an elevation of the gulf above the Atlantic in order to occasion the stream—a physical fact demonstrated by the most accurate measurements. The explanation of the stream was that the North Atlantic trade winds set the water of the Carribean Sea against the “Spanish Main” (Central America), deflected northward along the coast of Yucatan, where the flow is through the straits between Yucatan and Cuba, and thence through the Bernini Channel into the Atlantic Ocean, thus forming what is known os the “Gulf Stream/ The part wbish

the Gulf of Mexico has in this is ma nlv that of a reservoir or “accumulator, 6 maintaining the outflow at a more uniform rate than the assigned cause would admit of without such a reservoir.