The Vailan or annular theory: A synopsis of Prof. I. N. Vail's argument in support of the claim that this Earth once possessed a Saturn-like system of rings

by Stephen Bowers

ANNULAR DOWNFALL IN THE TERTIARY OCEAN OF THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE.

If the Vailian theory claims are valid the beds in the Rocky Mountain Tertiary must present the following features: The Cretaceous period having been brought to a close by a down-rush of waters and snows in the northern hemisphere, a stream of water pouring southward must to a great extent have been a fresh-water current, and those deposits in the extreme northern beds of the Rocky Mountain region must be largely fresh-water accumulations. Those in the middle of this region must be to a less extent fresh-water; perhaps sometimes fresh and again marine, owing to changes in currents, etc., and the two be commingled, while in the southern part the beds must be almost exclusively marine. Fortunately for the Vailian theory these demands are fully met. The waters of this vast region communicated with the Arctic ocean, probably by way of the present depression in British America, along the valley of the McKenzie river, while south it communicated with the Gulf of Mexico.

Here was a sea forty times larger than Lake Erie. Where did the water come from that made the northern part fresh, the middle part brackish and the southern portion marine? The Tertiary of the Pacific Coast is marine; so is a larger portion of the Atlantic border. Doubtless Davis Strait poured a volume of fresh-water from the polar world into the Atlantic, for there is the same commingling of marine and fresh-water shells on the northeast coast, while in the northern part they are exclusively fresh-water species. Rivers could not have done this, for all the rivers from Delaware Bay around the coast of the Gulf of Mexico were not sufficient to lay down fresh-water Tertiary. Admit that the vast polar ocean of the Tertiary period was a body of fresh-water, and all difficulties disappear.

Geologists admit that in the Tertiary period mountains were made on every continent, that there was a world-wide disturbance of strata, and the most complete extermination of species on record. The Cretaceous world was swept by a mighty cataclysmic wave, and its animals were buried in the detrital mass swept from the land into the seas and formed the lower Eocene beds. Nothing of which we can conceive could do this but a downpour of Annular waters. One-third of North America, a great part of Northern Europe, nearly all of Siberia, much of China, and other parts of Asia were apparently synchronously submerged beneath fresh-water.

The ocean of fresh-water proves the augmentation of snows from the great super-aerial fund. The Cretaceous age closed by excessive and unusual refrigeration. The transported blocks of stone found in the Upper Cretaceous and Lower Tertiary point to a northern origin. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of an Annular fall of waters in the north polar world at that time.

Existing continents were submerged under Cretaceous waters. The Rocky Mountains, Andes, Alps and Himalayas were either unborn or in their infant stage. But some mighty barrier was raised that rolled the Cretaceous waters southward, and made an isolated fresh-water ocean on the north. It was the great Atlantic plateau reaching from Newfoundland to Ireland, which is known by actual soundings and other evidence to be a submerged table land. It was raised from the deep at this very time and stood for uncounted milleniums as dry land.

Suppose an ice cap 5000 feet thick should suddenly cover the Arctic world. It would press that part of the globe inward and downward upon itself even if the planet were solid to the centre. It would render the rocks plastic and they would be pushed under the continents causing the crust of the earth to rise into mountains in many places. Just what occurred in Cretaceous and Tertiary times.

We can trace the shore-line of an almost limitless fresh-water sea around the whole hemisphere in Tertiary times, showing that the Arctic ocean was a wide expanse of fresh-waters. This leads to the positive and permanent establishment of the Vailian or Annular theory.