Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Crustal Drift

With my last two posts on the Pleistocene Nonconformity we have built up a much clearer picture or event hypothesis. It also largely removes the single most important problem with a crustal shift. How is it accomplished without completely sterilizing Earth in the process? In my article I showed one way that I thought was feasible. I still thought that it would be far too shaky to be easily survivable.

What we now have is an ordinary meteor with enough mass and velocity to strike the polar region with enough energy to initiate crustal movement in a world that was already unstable due to ice accumulation at both poles over a million years. Once moving, however slowly, it repositioned itself in such a manner as to rebalance the crust. A major tangential impact anywhere in the polar region would have served.

The meteor may even have been a comet not unlike the one that whacked Jupiter, but certainly much smaller. The bulk of the mass may even have been frozen liquids leaving little evidence except the already recognized dust evidence of iridium. This supported by the explosive arrival.

Slamming into the Ice sheet and exploding is an energy event that would scour the Northern Hemisphere leaving perhaps small blast shadows where survival was possible. The ice was a mile thick almost everywhere so penetration was very unlikely even of the ice for a low density object. The point that must be made is that the dynamic effect of an impact is going to be hugely abated without necessarily lessening the imparted vector to the crust itself. I think that it will turn out to be an unexpectedly neat solution to the problem of imparting thrust to the crust at the pole requiring vastly less energy than previous calculations showed.

Those that have read my article know that it is only necessary to jar the crust into motion. Recall that the crust is already moving freely to accommodate the continental drift of plates against each other. It is not sticky down there at the interface.

What I have been sharing with you is a radical new rethink of the crustal shift hypothesis espoused by Einstein and a few others back sixty years ago. They could not resolve the two key problems the idea faced. One was the problem of slipperiness which I address in my article and is empirically resolved with continental drift. The second was who pushed and where? We now are building the library of evidence for this event.

I invite everyone to keep an ear to the ground to pick up additional supporting evidence. Let your imagination work a bit. Locate Pleistocene strata anywhere and ask if there is a charcoal layer. There are never enough eyeballs and a river bank with a history of mastodon bones is a great start. Let us know. The entirety of the USA is very prospective.

Of course this all fleshes out the events that most likely are reflected in the Bronze Age tales of the great global flood. The idea of weeks of rain resulting from the initial impact is a natural consequence of the now observed heat event which dissipated over the seas boiling off huge amounts of water vapor. It would not easily be forgotten. The rise of the sea level over at least a thousand years and probably a lot longer for the most northerly remnants would have been unmistakable and again easily remembered in lore. The surprise is that these memories were successfully transmitted for ten thousand years.

The great importance of this hypothesis to the present day is that it puts to rest the idea that we can slide once again into a new ice age. Our current crustal configuration is very robust and is preventing a polar ice cap forming. We are good to go for the next million years or so. In fact, we are close to reinstating Bronze Age conditions in the Arctic. That would actually be nice.

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