Time and Tide by Sir Robert Stawell Ball (free ebook reader for android .TXT) 📕

loss by radiation into space. Even were the earth's surface solid copper or solid silver, both most admirable conductors of heat, the cooling down of this vast globe would be an extremely tardy process; how much more tardy must it therefore be when such exceedingly bad conductors as rocks form the envelope? How imperfectly material of this kind will transmit heat is strikingly illustrated by the great blast iron furnaces which are so vitally important in one of England's greatest manufacturing industries. A glowing mass of coal and iron ore and limestone is here urged to vivid incandescence by a blast of air itself heated to an intense temperature. The mighty heat thus generated--sufficient as it is to detach the iron from its close alliance with the earthy materials and to render the metal out as a pure stream rushing white-hot from the vent--is sufficiently confined by a few feet of brick-work, one side of which is therefore at the temperature of molten iron, while the other is at a temperature not much exceeding that of the air. We may liken the brick-work of a blast furnace to the rocky covering of the earth; in each case an exceedingly high temperature on one side is compatible with a very moderate temperature on the other.

Although the drainage of heat away from the earth's interior to its surface, and its loss there by radiation into space, is an extremely tardy process, yet it is incessantly going on. We have here again to note the ability for gigantic effect which a small but continually operating cause may have, provided it always tends in the same direction. The earth is incessantly losing heat; and though in a day, a week, or a year the loss may not be very significant, yet when we come to deal with periods of time that have to be reckoned by millions of years, it may well be that the effect of a small loss of heat per annum can, in the course of these ages, reach unimagined dimensions. Suppose, for instance, that the earth experienced a fall of temperature in its interior which amounted to only one-thousandth of a degree in a year. So minute a quantity as this is imperceptible. Even in a century, the loss of heat at this rate would be only the tenth of a degree. There would be no possible way of detecting it; the most careful thermometer could not be relied on to tell us for a certainty that the temperature of the hot waters of Bath had declined the tenth of a degree; and I need hardly say, that the fall of a tenth of a degree would signify nothing in the lavas of Vesuvius, nor influence the thunders of Krakatoa by one appreciable note. So far as a human life or the life of the human race is concerned, the decline of a tenth of a degree per century in the earth's internal heat is absolutely void of significance. I cannot, however, impress upon you too strongly, that the mere few thousands of years with which human history is cognizant are an inappreciable moment in comparison with those unmeasured millions of years which geology opens out to us, or with those far more majestic periods which the astronomer demands for the events he has to describe.

An annual loss of even one-thousandth of a degree will be capable of stupendous achievements when supposed to operate during epochs of geological magnitude. In fact, its effects would be so vast, that it seems hardly credible that the present loss of heat from the earth should be so great as to amount to an abatement of one-thousandth of a degree per annum, for that would mean, that in a thousand years the earth's temperature would decline by one degree, and in a million years the decline would amount to a thousand degrees. At all events, the illustration may suffice to show, that the fact that we are not able to prove by our instruments that the earth is cooling is no argument whatever against the inevitable law, that the earth, like every other heated body, must be tending towards a lower temperature.

Without pretending to any numerical accuracy, we can at all events give a qualitative if not a quantitative analysis of the past history of our earth, in so far as its changes of temperature are concerned. A million years ago our earth doubtless contained appreciably more heat than it does at present. I speak not now, of course, of mere solar heat--of the heat which gives us the vicissitudes of seasons; I am only referring to the original hoard of internal heat which is gradually waning. As therefore our retrospect extends through millions and millions of past ages, we see our earth ever growing warmer and warmer the further and further we look back. There was a time when those heated strata which we have now to go deep down in mines to find were considerably nearer the surface. At present, were it not for the sun, the heat of the earth where we stand would hardly be appreciably above the temperature of infinite space--perhaps some 200 or 300 degrees below zero. But there must have been a time when there was sufficient internal heat to maintain the exterior at a warm and indeed at a very hot temperature. Nor is there any bound to our retrospect arising from the operation or intervention of any other agent, so far as we know; consequently the hotter and the hotter grows the surface the further and the further we look back. Nor can we stop until, at an antiquity so great that I do not venture on any estimate of the date, we discover that this earth must have consisted of glowing hot material. Further and further we can look back, and we see the rocks--or whatever other term we choose to apply to the then ingredients of the earth's crust--in a white-hot and even in a molten condition. Thus our argument has led us to the belief that time was when this now solid globe of ours was a ball of white-hot fluid.

On the argument which I have here used there are just two remarks which I particularly wish to make. Note in the first place, that our reasoning is founded on the fact that the earth is at present, to some extent, heated. It matters not whether this heat be much or little; our argument would have been equally valid had the earth only contained a single particle of its mass at a somewhat higher temperature than the temperature of space. I am, of course, not alluding in this to heat which can be generated by combustion. The other point to which I refer is to remove an objection which may possibly be urged against this line of reasoning. I have argued that because the temperature is continually increasing as we look backwards, that therefore a very great temperature must once have prevailed. Without some explanation this argument is not logically complete. There is, it is well known, the old paradox of the geometric series; you may add a farthing to a halfpenny, and then a half-farthing, and then a quarter-farthing, and then the eighth of a farthing, followed by the sixteenth, and thirty-second, and so on, halving the contribution each time. Now no matter how long you continue this process, even if you went on with it for ever, and thus made an infinite number of contributions, you would never accomplish the task of raising the original halfpenny to the dignity of a penny. An infinite number of quantities may therefore, as this illustration shows, never succeed in attaining any considerable dimensions. Our argument, however, with regard to the increase of heat as we look back is the very opposite of this. It is the essence of a cooling body to lose heat more rapidly in proportion as its temperature is greater. Thus though the one-thousandth of a degree may be all the fall of temperature that our earth now experiences in a twelvemonth, yet in those glowing days when the surface was heated to incandescence, the loss of heat per annum must have been immensely greater than it is now. It therefore follows that the rate of gain of the earth's heat as we look back must be of a different character to that of the geometric series which I have just illustrated; for each addition to the earth's heat, as we look back from year to year, must grow greater and greater, and therefore there is here no shelter for a fallacy in the argument on which the existence of high temperature of primeval times is founded.

The reasoning that I have applied to our earth may be applied in almost similar words to the moon. It is true that we have not any knowledge of the internal nature of the moon at present, nor are we able to point to any active volcanic phenomena at present in progress there in support of the contention that the moon either has now internal heat, or did once possess it. It is, however, impossible to deny the evidence which the lunar craters afford as to the past existence of volcanic activity on our satellite. Heat, therefore, there was once in the moon; and accordingly we are enabled to conclude that, on a retrospect through illimitable periods of time, we must find the moon transformed from that cold and inert body she now seems to a glowing and incandescent mass of molten material. The earth therefore and the moon in some remote ages--not alone anterior to the existence of life, but anterior even to the earliest periods of which geologists have cognizance--must have been both globes of molten materials which have consolidated into the rocks of the present epoch.

We must now revert to the tidal history of the earth-moon system. Did we not show that there was a time when the earth and the moon--or perhaps, I should say, the ingredients of the earth and moon--were close together, were indeed in actual contact? We have now learned, from a wholly different line of reasoning, that in very early ages both bodies were highly heated. Here as elsewhere in this theory we can make little or no attempt to give any chronology, or to harmonize the different lines along which the course of history has run. No one can form the slightest idea as to what the temperature of the earth and of the moon must have been in those primeval ages when they were in contact. It is impossible, however, to deny that they must both have been in a very highly heated state; and everything we know of the matter inclines us to the belief that the temperature of the earth-moon system must at this critical epoch have been one of glowing incandescence and fusion. It is therefore quite possible that these bodies--the moon especially--may have then been not at all of the form we see them now. It has been supposed, and there are some grounds for the supposition, that at this initial stage of earth-moon history the moon materials did not form a globe, but were disposed in a ring which surrounded the earth, the ring being in a condition of rapid rotation. It was at a subsequent period, according to this view, that the substances in the ring gradually drew together, and then by their mutual attractions formed a globe which ultimately consolidated down into the compact moon as we now see it. I must, however, specially draw your attention to the clearly-marked line which divides the facts which dynamics have taught us from those notions which are to be regarded as more or less conjectural. Interpreting the action of the tides by the principles of dynamics, we are assured that the moon was once--or rather the materials