Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Unattributed, 1678
Chapter 15 -- The Maelstrom
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Unattributed
An interesting topic, we may agree, but --we may wonder -- have oceanic whirlpools to do with
underground rivers?
It took a great mind to deduce the tie.
Kircher's Meatus Subterraneus
To the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher, whom we met in Chapter 8, a whirlpool in the
high sea would have seemed akin to the vortex observed when draining a cask. Ergo, there must
be a hole in the floor of the sea.
The earliest chart of the global ocean circulation appeared in Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus
(1665).
A great whirlpool at the North Pole sucks in the waters [of the sea] to a tunnel by which they are
finally regurgitated at the South Pole.
Holding to Aristotle's "primum mobile" the map charts the seas' the general westward flow. As to
why particular currents should deviate from the ideal, Kircher turned to subterranean channels
and cavities. The earth rhythmically sucks water into its interior near the North Pole (thus
explaining the general pattern in the North Atlantic portion of his global map) and reissues it near
the South Pole, mainly at three sites radiating into the Indian Ocean.
The map featured small markers -- enlarged below in red -- marking subterranean entrances and
exits. Wherever an ocenanic perplexity arose, such a marker provided a solution. The pair of
dots straddling the Isthmus of Panama, for example, facilitates the globe's general westward
current, a belief dating to Plato.
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