Climatic Changes: Their Nature and CausesHuntington, Ellsworth
Science
Climatic Changes: Their Nature and Causes
Huntington, Ellsworth
Climatic changes; Climatology; Paleoclimatology
The question of the reality of the connection between meteorological
conditions and crustal movements is so important that every possible
test should be applied. At the suggestion of Professor Schlesinger we
have looked up a very ingenious line of inquiry. During the last decades
of the nineteenth century, a long series of extremely accurate
observations of latitude disclosed a fact which had previously been
suspected but not demonstrated, namely, that the earth wabbles a little
about its axis. The axis itself always points in the same direction, and
since the earth slides irregularly around it the latitude of all parts
of the earth keeps changing. Chandler has shown that the wabbling thus
induced consists of two parts. The first is a movement in a circle with
a radius of about fifteen feet which is described in approximately 430
days. This so-called Eulerian movement is a normal gyroscopic motion
like the slow gyration of a spinning top. This depends on purely
astronomical causes, and no terrestrial cause can stop it or eliminate
it. The period appears to be constant, but there are certain puzzling
irregularities. The usual amplitude of this movement, as
Schlesinger[135] puts it, "is about 0".27, but twice in recent years it
has jumped to 0".40. Such a change could be accounted for by supposing
that the earth had received a severe blow or a series of milder blows
tending in the same direction." These blows, which were originally
suggested by Helmert are most interesting in view of our suggestion as
to the blows struck by storms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account