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Show Seek Solution for Age-Old Mystery of Canyons in the Sea Collision of Earth With Asteroid Is Held Cause DID something that hit the United States a million years ago slow down the whole spinning earth? Were the hypothetical hypo-thetical meteorites that made the "bays" of the Carolinas responsible re-sponsible indirectly for the many recently discovered tremendous canyons can-yons in the bottom of the sea? These questions are raised by the suggestion put forth by two Princeton Prince-ton geologists, Drs. H. H. Hess and Paul MacClintoek, that the ocean level was lowered because of a sudden sud-den slowing down in the earth's rotation, ro-tation, thereby exposing to river erosion what had been, and Is now, sea bottom, and In turn permitting the canyons to be cut a sort of geological House That Jack Built Ocean Level Varies. The level of the ocean is higher at the equator and lower at the poles, it should be explained, because be-cause of the centrifugal effect of the earth's rotation, if the earth stopped, on even slowed down, there would be lower sea levels In lower latitudes, higher sea levels In the higher latitudes, proportional to the lessening of this centrifugal effect Doctors Hess and MacClintoek offer of-fer the Idea, on a quite candidly speculative basis, that some small as-tronomical body, like an asteroid, hit the earth about a million years ago, and slowed it down enough to permit the rest of the train of events to happen. Effect of Collision. Such a projectile would have to be so massive that the great Siberian Si-berian meteorite of a few years ago, whose effects even In the wilderness wilder-ness were devastating, would seem a mere pebble by comparison. For the Siberian crasher had no more gross effect on the earth as a whole than a tennis ball hitting a battleship. battle-ship. Ancient scars of what may have been a meteor fall of the required order of magnitude exist In the "bays" of the Carolina coastal plain. |