Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

The Abyss
Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation
The concept of a great void in the earth center goes back to
Plato, but its Biblical basis -- depending on how the reader takes
the Bible, of course -- propelled the concept into nearly-modern
times.
To the right is a da Vinci cross-section of the distribution of land,
mountains, oceans, lakes and rivers at the surface and a water
ball in the interior.
In his words,
This is meant to represent the earth cut through in the middle, showing the depths of the sea
and of the earth; the waters start from the bottom of the seas, and ramifying through the earth
they rise to the summits of the mountains, flowing back by the rivers and returning to the sea.
The great elevations of the peaks of the mountains above the sphere of the water may have
resulted from this that a very large portion of the earth which was filled with water, that is to say
the vast cavern inside the earth, may have fallen in a vast part of its vault towards the centre of
the earth.
"A vast cavern," to fire our imaginations! We'll see where the fiction writers take the topic in later
chapters.
Arts des Fontaines et Science des Eaux (1665) by Jesuit Jean François (1582-1668) endorsed
the presence of great subterranean caverns.
The earth's crust, dried out, ends by cracking. The water underneath expands and exerts
pressure against the vault of the orb, which will break into pieces and fall into the abyss. The
cracked crust, weakened, breaks up; water gushes violently out, in proportion to its mass and
the space it had just occupied.
Jean François' student, René Descartes (1596-1650)
soldiered and traveled before embracing solitude to pursue
his treatises. His proof of the equivalence of Euclidian
geometry and the algebraic geometry still stands. His
principle of the constancy of universal "momentum," on the
other hand, died with the publication of Newton’s Principia in
1687.
As we might expect, the author of “Cogito, ergo sum" would apply the power of reason to the
problem at hand. According to Descartes, the sun-like core of the earth was originally
surrounded by a shell of metals which in turn was enclosed by progressive spheres of water,
earth and air. As the inevitable decay of earthly materials began, portions of the shell cracked
and collapsed into the water below, the rocky protrusions becoming the modern continents and
the sunken earth, the sea floor.
The figure below illustrates the process.
But there being many crevices in the body E, which enlarge more and more, they are finally
become so great that it cannot be longer sustained by the binding of its parts, and that the vault
which it forms bursting all at once, its heaviness has made it fall in great pieces on the surface
of the body C. But because this surface was not wide enough to receive all the pieces of this
body in the same position as they were before, some fall on their sides and recline, the one
upon the other. -- Discours de la Méthode (1637)
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