How the Poles Illustrate Human Interdependence

The way to warm up the Arctic Ocean, and melt all the ice there, and make the land inhabitable, would be to submerge the Antarctic continent. Why? What is that Antarctic continent? It is a tremendous area, about one-fortieth of the whole circumference of the globe, it is said, and it is piled up with snow and ice, moun- tains high; there is a mountain as high as Mont Blanc at the fringe, and in the interior it is very much higher.

That means an immense volume, and what would be the effect if that became liquid and came into the sea? If that snow and ice disappeared the ocean would rise. Moreover, by its gravitative attraction-I do not know whether everyone will follow this, but you know that all matter attracts all other matter by gravitative attraction, and if the sea is kept piled up in the southern hemisphere in that frozen condition it is much higher than it would otherwise be.

If that Antarctic continent disappeared, subsided, was submerged, all that water, not only the water packed up as snow, but the water of the ocean, attracted by this gravitative attraction, would be released and flow up here, and some of our lowlands would be submerged. In addition, the Antarctic Ocean would be no longer land-locked; a hot-water circulation from the tropics would be laid on, and the Arctic ice would disappear. If I have made that quite clear, I only mean it as a parable—you cannot have even the North Pole isolated from the South Pole; what happens to one affects the other.

It may affect it for good, or it may be for ill, but it affects it. So it is with us. Our life cannot be isolated. Whether we are millionaires, or whatever we are, we are bound up with the rest of the human race, and if one member suffer, all suffer with him (1 Cor. xii.

26).