The Hollow Earth

by F. T. Ives

The Earth is said to be undergoing a cooling process for the past thousands of years, but at some remote time in the past it was covered with ice and traversed by glaciers.

There are various explanations of the phenomena of icebergs, glaciers, volcanoes, the Gulf Stream, and why the Mediterranean Sea does not fill up or change its conditions through the thousands of years known to history. The philosophy of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, increase of heat in digging deep in the earth, artesian wells, springs and lakes, all have various solutions for being as they are, but this discussion proposes to throw into the waste-basket nearly all of the accepted conclusions on the subject, and, in order to go to an extreme limit of Crankism, will dispute the law of Attraction of Gravitation. To dispute the long accepted conclusions on most of these topics would be presumptuous without an effort to give good and sufficient reason for such skepticism.

The first element to consider will be fire, or heat, without which, it seems safe to assert, nothing can be produced from the Earth, or by the devices of man. To draw a base line to work from, we will begin at the polar center of the Earth’s motion. The Earth, unlike any other object that perpetually revolves that we see or know of, does not have a shaft, or axle, or anything to create friction, and, therefore, heat. There is but one word in the English language that tells what will produce heat; that is friction, which may claim motion for its parentage. Now, this proposition is offered for a starting point. All heat is produced by friction, in the absence of which there can be no heat. This claim made, and presumably well established, how can there be any central heat of the Earth, revolving on nothing but an imaginary center? Will any scientist explain at what point heat begins to generate? It would appear as difficult as to accurately fix the point where moral responsibility commences in a child, or just when the wheel of time will cease to revolve. At whatever point heat begins, is it supposable that it works internally or outward? Any observing mind can give but one answer.

It is claimed, to prove the molten condition of the Earth’s interior, that the various borings for artesian wells and diggings in mines show a uniform increase of heat as greater depths are attained. All these ratios of increase differ somewhat in different localities, but not enough to have ever banished the idea that at a few thousand feet of depth everything would be a liquid mass. This idea ought to be absurd enough to make a brazen image smile.

Let us consider what these explorations into the bowels of the Earth amount to. The deepest holes bored or dug are, without exception, less than a mile deep. Admitting a mile, that is 1-4000 of the distance toward the center. Imagine a puncture on an orange, or on a ball eight inches in diameter being four inches to the center. Is there any man living could see a hole as small in proportion to its size to 1-4000 of one-half of its diameter? How insignificant such a test. Reasons for this delusion will be given later on, under treatment of Volcanoes.

Again, the Earth’s surface is covered with at least four-fifths water at depths ranging from one to five miles, including the millions of springs, lakes and rivers on land, to say nothing of the inexhaustible quantities of water encountered in the aforesaid boring and mining operations.

The deepest explorations in mines are the salt mines of Poland, the Calumet and Hecla copper mines and Comstock Lode. These have all been on trail of some mineral deposit formed by some remote work of Nature in the undefinable past, when volcanic or other influences in Nature’s laboratory left their deposit. These are the only places that man has explored, only insignificant depths, and formed extravagant conclusions of the rest of the way.

But let us go back to the oceans, with their great depths and extended areas, and what do we find? It is this: Whether on the Equator or on the coasts of Greenland, in the tropics or frigid latitudes the same, that at the deepest sea soundings the temperature is near or below the freezing point, being literally liquid ice. These temperatures are at depths of five times as deep as anybody has bored or dug, and cover four-fifths of the Earth’s surface, and, instead of being hot, or even warm, are extremely cold.

If the internal heat is as great as is claimed, it ought to be enough to set every drop of water in the oceans into a boiling condition inside of fifteen minutes, but there does not seem to be heat enough to warm the bottom of the kettle.

It is assumed that the earth originated in a nebulous form, or an aggregation of small starry bodies, or something else which nobody has as yet explained clearly.