Penrose's Party

Wound up with a flourish in Washington last week was the 16th International Geological Congress: an eight-day series of conferences which was only one phase of an elaborate, expensive scientific party attended by 500 geologists from 25 nations. Nominally their host was the U. S. Geological Survey. Actually their host was a fellow geologist--far richer than the general run of scientists and dead two years.

Held every three or four years in various countries since the first convention in Paris (1878), the I. G. C. tries not only to reach international standards of nomenclature and to serve as an international clearinghouse for new discoveries and theories, but also to give visiting geologists a chance to pore over the rocks and con tours of the countries in which the meetings are held.

The 16th I. G. C. was scheduled for last year in the U. S., in which no meeting had been held since 1891. When expected Congressional appropriations were not forthcoming the meeting was postponed until this year. Far from advancing funds to finance the convention, the Roosevelt Administration has been picking up pennies for its economy program by firing 150 scientists from the Geological Survey.

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce helped out by lending its building for the Washington meeting. Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History proffered an official welcome reinforced by a filling lunch. Princeton's Dr. Alexander Hamilton Phillips had a few of the outlanders to dinner. But the I. G. C. needed cash--not only for 1,001 ordinary convention expenses but for dozens of excursions in the eastern U. S., before the convention proper, and afterward for transcontinental field trips.

In their extremity, the Geological Survey officials turned to the Geological Society of America. Two years ago that body was astounded to learn that it had inherited $4,225,000. The benefactor was the late Dr. Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose, scholarly brother of Pennsyl vania's late famed Republican Boss Boies Penrose.

Graduated from Harvard in 1884, Scholar Penrose snapped up M. A. and Ph. D. degrees in two years more, got into field work for the Texas and Arkansas Geological Surveys. His academic career carried him to the University of Chicago's Chair of Economic Geology, presidency of the Society of Economic Geology and the Geological Society of America.

Meanwhile he multiplied inheritances from two brothers and his father (onetime professor of Obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania) through utility and mining interests, particularly by shrewd investments in Utah copper. Claim holders listened to his advice as to an oracle. His friends considered his record as an investor as spotless as his reputation as a scientist. Nevertheless they were surprised at the size and liquidity of his holdings when he died. He had some French gold, a sheaf of Bank of England notes, accounts in one British and nine U. S. banks. A bachelor, he divided most of his $10,000,000 hoard between the American Philosophical Society and the Geological Society of America. The latter body long pondered what to do with its income, was glad to help the floundering I. G. C.

Varves and Summers, As the geologists fanned and mopped themselves in a temperature of 91DEG, Dr. Ernst Valdemar Antevs, who was born in cool Sweden and now lives in cool Maine, blandly told them they were enjoying a period of cool summers which began 4,500 years ago and would last 6,500 years more. Germany's Dr. Rudolf Spitaler first suspected that the northern hemisphere has warm summers when the eccentricity of earth's orbit swings it close to the sun during the northern summer.

This condition, he found, obtains for periods of roughly 11,000 years, then lapses for an equal period while the southern hemisphere takes its turn. Confirmation of this astronomical hypothesis Dr. Antevs had last week in varves: layers of sediments deposited, one layer a year, by melting glaciers. The varves are light-tinted when glacial ice melts fast (hot summers), dark-tinted when it melts slowly (cool summers). Dr. Antevs counted and deciphered 35,000 varves, found a cycle of alternately cool & warm summers in close agreement with the Spitaler calculations.

First Continents, More than 100,000,000 years ago the hideous, ungainly reptiles which were then the lords of life roamed two vast continents, ''Gondwanaland" in the southern hemisphere, "Laurasia" in the northern. A globe-girdling ocean, the "Tethys Deep," divided them. Mighty Gondwanaland shuddered, cracked and sundered. Its fragments drifted to form South America. Africa. Australia, Peninsular India, Madagascar. Mighty Laurasia similarly broke to form North America and Eurasia.

This dramatic cataclysm was prosaically described last week in an effort to show that it was true. Its describer was Dr. Alexander Du Toit of Johannesburg who, defending the widely held ''displacement hypothesis," brought into court recent studies of fossils, glacial records and sedi mentary rocks of southern lands now separated by water. So much alike are these records at corresponding stages, urged Dr. Du Toit, that they must have been deposited in one undivided land. But the geological record of the southern hemisphere as a whole is utterly different from that of the northern--which would show that mighty Gondwanaland and mighty Laurasia were divided by some such mighty barrier as the "Tethys Deep."

How the "Tethys Deep" was bridged by Central America was indicated by Yale's Dr. Hellmut de Terra. With the cooling and shrinking of earth's underlying shell of magmatic (semifluid) rock, the northern and southern land masses drew toward each other. Pinched between them, the bottom of the "Tethys Deep" wrinkled, bulged upward, finally, as the pressure increased, emerged from the water to form a bridge.*

Cosmic Ripples. Dr. Arnold Heim. famed oil & mining consultant, attended the I. G. C. as a delegate of the Swiss Government and the Swiss Academy of Science. Landing in Manhattan last month, he made news by promising to disclose a new theory to explain the twitchings that have changed earth's face. Last week he kept his promise. First with merciless logic he assailed the old thesis that earth's crustal movements represented the spending of terrestrial energy.

"All the forces," said Dr. Heim, "which have waved, lifted, folded, crumpled, thrust and faulted the earth's crust . . . seem to be regarded as the result of the earth's energetic reserve. If so, each crustal movement should mean a lessening of the total reserve of earth's energy, so that succeeding . . . movements should be smaller than earlier ones. . . . This does not seem to be borne out by the facts."

Some" cosmic impulse of mysterious origin, said Dr. Heim, must be imagined to explain not only the crustal movements, but also fitful accelerations in the rate of earth's rotation and displacements in the position of its axis. Thus he pictured an earth not growing more & more inert, like a snake in the cold, as it consumed its legacy of energy from the sun, but an earth constantly stirred by fresh cosmic im pulses--"although," he added, "the Newton to explain them has not yet come."

Petrofabrics. Whether terrestrial or cosmic, the forces that built the Alps tied them into complicated kinks. Bruno Sander, a native of the Austrian Tyrol and professor at the University of Innsbruck, described his method of studying the kinks. Specimens of crystalline rock were ground to paper thinness, peered at under the microscope where the force lines spring to view. By plotting hundreds of force lines from different parts of a mountain, he deduces the slidings and thrustings that formed the mountain. He calls his method petrofabrics, thinks it may prove useful in locating ore veins.

Rock Chart. Toward the close of the Congress, Chief Geologist Dr. Timothy William Stanton of the U. S. Geological Survey proudly exhibited a variegated rectangle 87x51 in.--an elaborate chart of all U. S. rocks, in 23 colors arranged in 160 units. It summarized the Survey's work since 1879. filled a long-felt need of schools. Said Dr. Stanton: "In 1911 we had a map, but it was far less complete and detailed. Also for more than 15 years past it has been out of print."

U. S. S. R, Recognized. While the U. S. was still officially incognizant of the existence of Soviet Russia last week, the I. G. C. Council pondered in friendly spirit a Soviet Government offer to be host to the 17th I. G. C. The offer was accepted. The 17th Congress will be held in Russia in 1936 or 1937.

*But no one explained how Africa slid up to straddle the Equator.

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