The Prospective Changes in the Pacific Ocean

Abstract

Towards the birth of the twentieth century, the US Secretary of State, John Hays, made a remarkable statement by forecasting that: “The Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic Ocean of the present, but the Pacific is the ocean of the future.” About 50 years earlier, another US Secretary of State: William Seward expressed more or less the same forecast by predicting that: “henceforth, European commerce, European politics and European activity, although becoming actually more intimate, will nevertheless sink in importance, while the Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands and the vast region beyond, will become the chief theatre of events in the world’s greatest hereafter.”1