Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/315

Rh twenty feet deep; but suppose them to be six thousand feet deep. The process of evaporation, after the St. Lawrence has gone dry, might go on until one or two thousand feet or more were lost from the surface, and we should then have another instance of the level of an island water-basin being far below the sea-level, as in the case of the Dead Sea; or it would become a rainless district, when the lakes themselves would go dry. Or let us take another case for illustration. Corallines are at work about the Gulf Stream; they have built up the Florida Reefs on one side, and the Bahama Banks on the other. Suppose they should build up a dam across the Florida Pass, and obstruct the Gulf 'Stream? and that, in like manner, they were to connect Cuba with Yucatan by damming up the Yucatan Pass, so that the waters of the Atlantic should cease to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. What should we have? The depth of the marine basin which holds the waters of that Gulf is, in the deepest part, about a mile. We should therefore have, by stopping up the channels between the Gulf and the Atlantic, not a sea-level in the Gulf, but we should have a mean level between evaporation and precipitation. If the former were in excess, the level of the Gulf waters would sink down until the surface exposed to the air would be just sufficient to return to the atmosphere, as vapour, the amount of water discharged by the rivers—the Mississippi and others—into the Gulf. As the waters were lowered, the extent of evaporating surface would grow less and less, until Nature should establish the proper ratio between the ability of the air to take up and the capacity of the clouds to let down. Thus we might have a sea whose level would be much farther below the water-level of the ocean than is the Dead Sea.

538. The formation of inland basins—a third process.—There is still another process, besides the one already alluded to, by which the drainage of these inland basins may, through the agency of the winds, have been cut off by the great salt seas, and that is by the elevation of continents from the bottom of the sea in distant regions of the earth, and the substitution caused thereby of dry land instead of water for the winds to blow upon. Now suppose that a continent should rise up in that part of the ocean, wherever it may be, that supplies the clouds with the vapour that makes the rain for the hydrographic basin of the great American lakes. What would be the result? Why, surely, fewer clouds and less rain, which would involve a change of