Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation
The Tuscan Ristoro d'Arezzo (1223-1283) proposed in his treatise La Composizione del Mondo
(1282) that the central cause of mountains resides with the stars. The heavens have a mountain
and valley character, and where there is a mountain in the heavens, there is a corresponding
valley on the earth. (We will see something similar when we consider the "contrapositionality" of
hollow earth hydrocartography, Chapter 26.) The “virtues of the heavens” call water to rise as a
magnet attracts iron.
Da Vinci drew upon La Composizione del Mondo, explaining how water washes gravel downslope
to raise valley elevations while subterranean streams bear earth upward on a seasonal
basis.
Bernard Varenius, author of Geographia Generalis (1692), the day's standard reference on
physical geography, saw the cycle as dualistic.
Therefore the waters of Fountains proceed partly from the Sea or Subterranean waters, partly
from Rivers, and Dew, that moisten the Earth. But the water of Rivers partly proceedeth from
Springs, and partly from Rain and Snow.
A dual cycle could even explain closed basins, watersheds such as that of the Dead Sea having
no visible outlet to the sea. From Jean Henri Hassenfratz' Les Presses de l’Ecole des Mines
(1806)
Africa and Asia are in the shape of a cone dug out at the summit. The waters flow out in part
into the center; they are reunited into the great lakes or interior seas from which they are
transported to the sea, either by evaporation, or by underground conduits.
To let the sumps of Africa and Asia drain to the abyss from where flow returns to the sea, we
need only add an upward lower-left arrow to our schematic.
Evaporation
Ocean
Precipitation
Rivers
Underground
Rivers
The Dual Hydrologic Cycle with Ocean Return
Isaac Vossius (1618-1689) was a Latin scholar who edited Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Vossius'
Aliorum Fluminum Origine (1666) allowed that caverns in fact might be directly fed by rainwater.
All Rivers proceed from a Colluvies of Rendezvous of Rain-water, and that, as the Water that
falls upon the Hills, gathers more early together, than that which falls in Plaines, therefore it is
that Rivers ordinarily take their Sources from Hills.
Our schematic needs but right-side arrow.
Clouds
Land
Caverns
Springs
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