Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 26 -- Subterranean Water Bodies
Rudy Rucker's The Hollow Earth (1990) is set in 1836. Mason Algiers
Reynolds leaves his family's Virginia farm with his father's slave, a dog,
and a mule. Branded a murderer, he finds sanctuary with his hero,
Edgar Allan Poe, and together they embark on an extraordinary
Antarctic expedition to the South Pole, the entrance to the hollow earth.
Edgar Allan Poe? The Antarctic? As we've noted in earlier chapters,
the Symmes thread is well woven into American literature. Rucker's plot
is hardly original, but it's a clever way to introduce a Boys Club to
American history. Of interest to us, however, is Rucker's attention to
fluid mechanics.
There were large droplets of water everywhere-some as big as peaches, some as big as
pumpkins. In the moist air, they condensed like dew. But in these near-weightless conditions,
the water drops were free to merge and grow to unearthly size. I drank several of the smaller
ones. The bigger, head-size drops held tiny fish with stubby fins like legs. Our passage
knocked the drops loose, and they slid down to merge with drops closer to the jungle's inward
edge, the larger drops sliding into the sky and falling all the way to the center, there -- I
supposed -- to be cooked to vapor and sent back.
What better way to fish than to reach into the waterballs?
We came on the biggest waterball yet -- a monstrous trembling sphere the size of a barn,
hemmed in on the upward side by vines and tendrils and cradled on the inward side by the
crotch where a huge dead branch stuck out of a living tree. Peering into the water, I could
make out some of those stubby-legged fish I'd seen before, only these fish were plump and a
foot long. I slipped out of my clothes and pushed into the water, my new knife in one hand.
The fish scattered. I swam across the waterball, stuck my head out for air, then swam back.
One of the fish got right in front of me. I swam at it, trapping it against the surface, but just as I
lunged with my knife, the fish jumped out of the water. I came out after it only to see the fish
flopping its way up through the air, using its little finlegs to push off from every branch it passed.
Maybe later it would creep back into this big glob, or maybe it would find another. Let it be.
Rucker's excursion exceeding the limits of credibility notwithstanding, the author is reasonably
correct (for a Boys Club author, that is) regarding waterballs. Motionless mist would indeed
remain suspended in air, surface tension coalescing the droplets into larger spheres. This isn't
an underground waterbody, actually, as much as it's a world of reverse bubbles, but the fishing
makes good reading.
It's one thing to spin an engaging adventure for a Boys Club; it's another to pawn the model as
actual science, Cyrus Teed of Chapter 14, Hollow Earth Geophysics, being a case in point.
According to Teed; we're on the concave
inside of a shell, our heads pointing to the
center with centrifugal force thrusting us
outward.
A hollow earth could indeed be twirled such that a Niagara at a particular latitude on the innershell
cascades outward in the shape of the gravitational Niagara with which we are familiar, but
an inner-earth waterfall situated at a lower latitude will fall more quickly. At the poles, the
waterfall won't fall at all. The figures below suggest how a cascade of the same discharge,
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