| I
started dreaming. For
some reason I
dreamt about
being with the Geography Department at Aberystwyth University
and about
how we were watching shale rocks being "folded" into slates – rock
being compressed tightly into itself under high pressure deep down in
the earth's crust. We were looking for a really big, |
flat, piece of
slate. Then I remembered a boat I once wished that I'd owned,
except that now it was now like a university science project and what I
wanted was to make my boat go faster through the water. (My boat was on
Bala lake in Wales.)
The students told me why
my boat was so slow; it was
because Bala lake has an outflow; which meant |
that, hydrodynamically,
Bala lake
has a "slope", which in turn meant that the water
molecules
have a kind of "pressure" in them from one end of the lake to the other
that stopped them from lying there properly. They were not "locked" and
so they were hindering my boat. |
Diving
boat "Aegir" on the Caspian Sea. |
|
So in my dream I put my boat onto the sea, but my boat was still too
slow, the water molecules still had that "slope". But where was the
outflow from the Whole Sea? Then I remembered that one
part of the sea,
the Mediterranean, is a "sink"; water flows down into it from the
general ocean. |
So
I took my dream boat to the Mediterranean. But I
still found that "slope". So where does the water flow to - out from
the Mediterranean? Not to the Black Sea, because there are big rivers
flowing from the land into the Black Sea - enough to mean
that there is
a constant stream of fresh water flowing out from there through the
Bosporus channel |
to the Med. But it came to
me that the
Bosporus has a
"counter-flow". At a deeper level through the Bosporus
there is a
salt-water flow, back into the Black Sea.
But still, when I tried my dream boat in the Black Sea, it was too
slow.
|
"Locked"
water molecules folding into themselves as they settle over slates on the bed of the
Caspian. |
| I got our big atlas down off
the shelf - to look at
where any dream waterflow could possibly be going out from the Black
Sea.
And when I looked I found that a little way to the east
of the Black
Sea is the Caspian Sea - and I found that the surface of
this inland
sea is several hundred feet below general sea level. So could there be
a subterranean watercourse flowing from the |
Black Sea to the Caspian?
I
remembered reading strange tales of the Caspian. Strange things from
that secret sea. So I took my dream boat to the Caspian. But the boat
was still slowed down. How could water possibly be flowing
away,
creating that "slope-pressure", from beneath the Caspian? My boat was a
diving-boat and I took the dream dive down. I went right down 90 meters
to the bed of the lowest sea in the world.
|
There
was a kind of "floor" of flat slate down there,
just like the University had been looking for, and as the water settled
onto the surface of that slate it finally "locked" and became smooth,
but then that "locked" water imitated
the slate it lay on, and began
folding into itself - and took up less space – and so made
the flow to
fill the space it had created. |
|
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© Chris Reynolds
2012 |
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