Sliding?

Are the North and South American continents rooted immovably into the curved crust of the earth, or are they slipping slowly away from Europe and toward Asia? Probably there is no slipping. The earth's crust is exceedingly solid, exceedingly strong.

Yet the sliding theory is not fantastic and merits testing. Last week, Major William Bowie, chief of the U. S. Geodetic Survey, indicated how the test could and probably would be made in 1926:

Radio stations, strung around the world so as to form a closed circuit of communication, would flash time signals to one another. From the difference between the times flashed by stations in Heligoland and Hawaii, and the times simultaneously recorded in stations at Halifax and Seattle, the degrees of longitude between any two stations could nf be very accurately computed. Any slide of this continent would readily appear from further longitudinal determinations made 5, 10, 15 years afterward.