The Mining and Smelting Magazine, Band 6

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The Office, 1864
 

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Seite 201 - It has been always a favourite theory of the miners that the high temperature of this Cornish spring is due to the oxidation of the sulphurets of copper and iron, which are decomposed when air is admitted. That such oxidation must have some slight effect is undeniable ; but that it materially influences the temperature of so large a body of water is out of the question. Its effect must be almost insensible ; for Professor Miller has scarcely been able to detect any sulphuric acid in the water, and...
Seite 201 - ... levels on each side of the lode. The almost entire absence of magnesium raises an obvious objection to the hypothesis of this spring deriving its waters from the sea ; or if such a source be suggested for the salt and other marine products, we should be under the necessity of supposing the magnesium to be left behind in combination with some of the elements of the decomposed and altered rocks through which the thermal waters may have passed. Hot springs are, for the most part, charged with alkaline...
Seite 204 - ... implies. The exact nature of the chemical changes which hydrothermal action may effect in the earth's interior will long remain obscure to us, because the regions where they take place are inaccessible to man ; but the manner in which volcanoes have shifted their position throughout a vast series of geological epochs — becoming extinct in one region and breaking out in another — may, perhaps, explain the increase of heat as we descend towards the interior, without the necessity of our appealing...
Seite 204 - Volcanoes, insisted on the important part which water plays in an eruption, when intimately mixed up with the component materials of lava, aiding, as he supposed, in giving mobility to the more solid materials of the fluid mass. But when advocating this igneo-aqueous theory, he never dreamt of impugning the Huttonian doctrine as to the intensity of heat which the production of the unstratified rocks, those of the plutonic class especially implies.
Seite 198 - ... siliceous layers which encrust the circular basin of an Icelandic geyser, we should soon see a considerable cone built up, with a crater in the middle ; and if the action of the spring were intermittent, so that ten or twenty years should elapse between the periods when solid matter was emitted, or...
Seite 198 - When there, it may be subjected to deoxidating processes, so that the nitrogen, being left in a free state, may be driven upwards by the expansive force of heat and steam, or by hydrostatic pressure. This theory has been very generally adopted, as best accounting for the constant disengagement of large bodies of nitrogen, even where the rocks through which the spring rises are crystalline and unfossiliferous. It will, however, of course be admitted, as Prof.
Seite 208 - Enough, however, have been found to justify the assertion that the sedimentary portion of the great metalliferous belt of the Pacific coast of North America is chiefly made up of rocks of Jurassic and Triassic age, with a comparatively small development of carboniferous limestone...
Seite 201 - F., since the renewed heat derived from below would have -warmed the walls and contents of the lode, so as to raise their temperature above that which would naturally belong to the rocks at corresponding levels on each side of the lode. The almost entire absence of magnesium raises an obvious objection...
Seite 197 - ... waters of Bath are far from being conspicuous among European hot springs for the quantity of mineral matter contained in them in proportion to the water which acts as a solvent ; yet Professor Ramsay has calculated that if the sulphates of lime and of soda, and the chlorides of sodium and magnesium and the other mineral ingredients which they contain, were solidified, they would form in one year a square column 9 feet in diameter, and no less than 140 feet in height. All this matter is now quietly...
Seite 199 - ... descends through rents or porous rocks till it encounters some mass of heated matter by which it is converted into steam, and then driven upwards through a fissure. In its downward passage the water may derive its sulphate of lime, chloride of calcium, and other substances from the decomposition of the gypseous, saline, calcareous, and other constituents of the rocks which it permeates. The greater part of the ingredients are common to seawater, and might suggest the theory of a marine origin...

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