Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1886 — Not Great After All. [ARTICLE]

Not Great After All.

The recent French surveys have shown that the magnitude of the Algerian sea project has been greatly exaggerated. No large part of Northern Africa can be flooded, the Desert of Sahara proving to have an average height of eleven hundred feet, and the only area below sea level being comprised in two “chotts” commencing about one hundred miles due west of the Gulf of Gabes and covering only about thirty-one hundred square miles —less than one-half the area of Lake Ontario. The flooding of the depressed region would give a lake averaging seventy-eight feet in depth. The creation of a new sea of such size could hardly produce the great effects upon the world’s climates and upon the depth of the ocean which have been foreseen in the speculations of some scientific writers.