. . . e v o l u t i o n e m . . .

 

         taking a fresh look at evolution

PLANETARY METAMORPHOSIS PART 2 .....

 

If the Theory of Planetary Metamorphosis is correct, as each planet gets closer to the Sun, the day length - the time the planet takes to rotate on itself - should get longer. Venus, the next planet in, has a day length of 2802 hours while Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, has a day length of 4222 hours.

 

Since the mid fifties, with the invention of the atomic clock, time has been defined with extreme accuracy. But this level of accuracy has left us with a problem; an ongoing annual discrepancy has been observed: 0.9 of a second has to be added to each year. This is because the day length of the Earth is becoming slightly longer over time. Astonishingly, it does not appear to have occurred to anyone that these time discrepancies could be due to the Earth getting closer to the Sun.  

 

The relative abundance of elements within rocky planets may simply reflect the elements in the debris mopped up in initial stages of migration from the outer edges of the Solar system.

Our planets would then be made exclusively from  Star Dust (quote Carl Sagan).

 

As our Solar System circumnavigates the Milky Way Galaxy every 220 million years, it could be that debris zones in other parts of the Galaxy are passed through and assimilated by planets, and that debris often contains the heavier elements.

 

Planet Earth is at the optimum distance from the Sun to provide favourable conditions for the existence of life.

 

Mars is just over half this distance again from the Sun. Consequently Mars is generally too cold for life - as life requires water in its liquid form. Liquid water may, however, occur in certain areas - perhaps subterranean, or in and around volcanic activity or thermal springs.

 

Venus, the next planet in, is too near the Sun - at less than three quarters of the distance of the Earth - from the Sun. Venus’ water is in the form of super heated steam. Heavy clouds of sulphuric acid and an atmospheric pressure ninety times that of planet Earth, make this a very inhospitable place - even for space craft.  

 

It seems like Venus has started to decay - going through the process of sublimation (the direct change of phase from solid to vapour  without passing through the liquid phase). This impression is based on the observation that planets from now on ,in the planetary lifecycle, start getting smaller.

 

The outer shell of the planet containing the lighter elements is being blasted by the pressure of the solar wind. These are predominantly those elements that are constituent ‘anions’ - carbonates, sulphates, silicates. This accounts for the heavy carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid atmosphere.

 

Residual hulks of heavier elements like iron are the characteristics of planets in the final stages of their life cycle.

This final stage begins about half way between the Earth stage and the Venus stage -  about 130 million km from the Sun.

 

The diameters of these planets are as follows

Earth     12,756 Km

Venus    12,103 Km

Mercury    4,880 Km

 

As noted previously, as planets get closer in orbit to the Sun, their rotation slows down, giving a longer day length. This could mean, at a critical point, the loss of any moon orbiting the planet. Planetary rotation is essential in the mechanics of maintaining a satellite; ideally, gravitational pull on the satellite is in balance with the force flinging it outwards. This could explain why Venus and Mercury do not have moons. The Moon is moving away from the Earth in its orbit - some 6.5 cm each year. This has been determined by measuring laser light reflecting off mirrors which have been placed on the Moon. This must confirm that the Earth’s rotation is slowing down.

 

So some smaller moons (like those on Jupiter) may be second hand - and could have had previous owners such as Venus or Mercury in their earlier stages.

 

Mercury is at a point of orbit which is just over a third of the distance of the Earth from the Sun. By now it has been reduced (theoretically by sublimation) to a measly size of 4,880 Km diameter - not much larger than our own Moon which is 3476 Km diameter.

 

Mercury as the innermost planet must be very near the end of its life as a planet in orbit around the Sun. What exactly happens in the final stages is difficult to speculate. Mercury will eventually stop rotating on itself - like the Moon has in relation to the Earth - and one side will always present itself to the Sun. This will result in one side of the planet getting a great deal hotter than the other, and this will cause it to boil. Its proximity to the Sun would also leave it exposed to tidal magnetism and outbursts of energy from Sun spots.

 

Mercury may disintegrate, and its pieces could add to the debris of the Main Asteroid Belt, or make small irregular Moons like those orbiting Mars. Alternatively it could fire itself away from the the Sun, intact, by a kind of jet propulsion as one side of it burns away.

 

Our Moon is strikingly similar to Mercury in its burnt-out cinder appearance. In fact one side of the Moon even looks as though it has been subjected to more intense heat than the other.The Moon is slightly egged shaped and the crust on the smaller end (that which faces the Earth) is only 60 km thick compared with the other side which has a crust thickness of 100 km.  Elements like hafnium and zirconium, which have high melting points, are more plentiful in lunar rocks than in the Earth’s rocks. Sodium and potassium, elements with lower melting points, on the other hand, are more scarce in lunar rocks.

 

So, perhaps, the Moon was originally a full blown planet like ours, before its demise. If this was so then another obvious question is - how did it become captured in the Earth’s magnetic field? Did it collide with the Earth or did it wander just close enough to be gradually pulled into the Earth’s influence? Samples of material brought back from the Moon suggest it is very old, some 4.5 billion years old.

 

The Moon has no magnetic field surrounding it. Magnetic fields can be destroyed by exposure to intense heat - above 500 degrees C - temperatures easily attained by a proximity to the Sun. In addition the moon rock samples are devoid of hydrated materials - again suggesting a baking at some stage. Tests on samples of rocks taken from the Moon show that the surface was last hot, some three billion years ago, and it was at this time that its magnetism was ‘switched off’( Bevan M French)

.

 

We must also ask - how many planets have so far come and gone in our solar system within the  last several billion years? We should be able to estimate this number by measuring the amount of asteroid material in the Main Belt (between Mars and Jupiter) and the Kuiper Belt and also adding the mass of the many moons currently orbiting planets.  

 

In this estimation we need to include Pluto and its large moon Charon. I will rank Pluto as a moribund planet like our Moon and not as one of the eight true planets.

 

The diameter of Pluto is  2274 km

                      Charon   1212 km  

                 Earth’s Moon 3476 km

 

Pluto and its large satellite are so far away from us (38 AU ) that it is not possible at the moment to get clear images but it is envisaged they are Moon like in their appearance.  

 

If the Theory of Planetary Metamorphosis is correct, then we need to re-assess the age of the Sun. Current opinion suggests the Sun is only 5 billion years old - not much older than the Earth itself. We  also need to estimate the rough time interval between the planets at their different positions. We could do this by estimating the planetary position Earth was at when life began. We know that life has been around for approximately three and a half billion years.

 

However, if we were to use this length of time as the time interval between planets, the sum total of intervals between all the current and previous planets would be too long; It would give the Sun an age older than the universe itself.

 

So life must have got established on Earth long before the Mars stage.  An interval between planet stages of two billion years, however, would still lead to an excessive figure in total.

 

So let us  start by estimating that interval is one billion years. Venus would be one billion years older than Earth. Mercury would  then be 2 billion years older than Earth. The other three or four ‘moribund’ planets may be up to 6.0 billion years older than Earth. Going the other way Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would be  would be 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 billion years, respectively, younger than Earth. This would give a total of 11 billion years.

 

Note that Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury are equally spaced between each other at orbital intervals of roughly 0.3 AU. Curiously Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are also equally spaced apart at orbital intervals of roughly 10 AU. Is there any significance between these two sets of intervals? Jupiter is the odd-man out in  that it is only 4.2 AU from the next gas planet. Perhaps  this a reflection of a transitional status.

 

The above estimation assumes an equivalent interval of time between the planets and this is because it is envisaged that all planets migrate inwards, in step with each other. This estimated figure of eleven billion years is not beyond a feasible age for the Sun as contemporary estimates puts an age for the Universe of some 13 billion years. Personally I believe the Universe is much, much older than this. If our Sun is middle aged and is half way on its way to the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the Milky Way Galaxy is half way on its journey to the centre of the Universe, (The Great Attractor), a much longer time period measured in hundreds of billions of years would be needed to allow the older structures to develop.

 

Life Begins

 

Archaic life has been in existence for around 3.5 billion years.

This would mean the life in  its most basic form would have emerged at the outer edges of the solar system - when the Earth’s  planetary life-cycle was between the stages of Neptune and Uranus.

At the moment we do not know enough about the environment on the cores of gas planets and which building materials for life exist there. It could be that areas of this internal crust provide favourable conditions for the origin of basic life - heat, for example, being generated through core compression and chemical reaction. If life did originate here then it suggests that there is a continuum of state as the planets enlarge to Jupiter’s stage.

 

Data from the Galileo Space Probe, which only reached a 150 km penetration into the cloud tops of Jupiter, indicate an atmosphere of 90% hydrogen, 10% helium with traces of methane, water, and ammonia. A similar  atmospheric composition was indicated for Saturn by the Hubble-Huygens craft. It seems like all the gas planets could provide the conditions for brewing the ‘primeval soup’, the chemistry of life.

 

The building blocks of life are amino acids. An interesting report in Science 1998 by the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University documents research on amino acid synthesis. Experiments on hydrothermal vents (hot springs, geysers) were aimed at identifying the primordial chemosynthesis reactions for life’s origin.

 

They conclude that hydrothermal vents at temperatures of 100 deg C and moderately reducing, provide ideal environments for the synthesis of amino acids. Synthesis reactions under these conditions have been identified for 20 different amino acids. The geology and geochemistry of hydrothermal vents provides an inflow of chemical disequilibria which can power anabolic reactions (Shock, McCollom, Schulte). From this it suggests that the first forms of life were autotrophic and relied on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis  (Shock, Russell and Jakowsky).

 

We associate hydrothermal springs with volcanism, but perhaps we could view them as the closest representative of conditions on the crustal surface of the core of a young planet like Saturn.

 

The Huygens spacecraft’s visit to one of Saturn’s Moon - Io  detected  relatively complex hydrocarbons in its atmosphere in addition to significant quantities of methane.

 

Nucleic acids  of RNA and DNA are derived from  amino acids which are formed from the elements of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. So let us speculate that in Earth’s Neptune’s stage, the conditions for building a vast quantity of amino acids somehow came about on its core surface. This was roughly five billion years ago.

 

By the time Earth reached the Uranus stage, perhaps RNA had formed from  nucleic acids and it could assemble copies of itself spontaneously.

 

By the time Earth had reached the Saturn stage, replicating forms of early life - possibly resembling archaea  would have arrived. These organisms could have been powered by anaerobic reducing reactions, which have methane and water as end products of the process. A type of Archaea (the most primitive of life-forms) known as methanogens precisely use these gas resources (Methanosarcina spp for example) in their energy processes, and the bi-products are methane and water. These organisms can also fix nitrogen as ammonia.

 

These extraordinary organisms can survive in wide-ranging environmental conditions. They have been discovered deep below  the permanently frozen Lake Fryxell in Antarctica (Department of Microbiology, University of Southern Illinois, 2005). At the other extreme, some methanogens can survive in temperatures up to 110 degrees Centigrade. They have been found at depths in the earth of 5 kilometres. They are now considered to be the natural manufacturers of the gas reserves in the gas fields throughout the world. They are also commonly  found in the intestines of animals.

A good resource for the information on methanogens is Microbewiki  http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Methanococcus_janna schii

 

Perhaps one day we will exploit these organisms to produce hydrocarbon fuels from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

 

Are We Alone?

 

Complex and intelligent life may be unique to our planet Earth. We may be entirely alone in the whole universe.

 

On the other hand, there is a chance that simple organisms like the archaea may have come about on other planets, In fact something similar may be the producer of methane in the gas planets of our own solar system.

 

What is sure is, we are the end result of a series of chance situations which have occurred over the last five billion years. Each stage depended upon a continuum of state to the next - within limited parameters, however tenuous it may have been.

 

We may ponder: Could Venus have supported life up to a billion years ago? Would Mars be covered in a frozen ocean now,  if it had evolved basic life in its youth?  If basic life like these methanogens can live in extreme conditions and deep within rock, then it certainly seems feasible that they could have evolved on the young stages of what are now defunct planets. These organisms could have been disseminated throughout the solar system on large asteroids (or comets) which are the debris of these defunct planets. Methanogens could have established themselves on Europa - one of Jupiter’s moons.  Europa could be a large chunk of an original planet on which many forms of life originally existed, and methanogens - with their ability to survive deep down in the crust - are the only survivors.  

Ceres, a minor planet between Mars and Jupiter appears to have a deep ocean covering its entire surface. See:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ceres_Cutaway.jpg

 

 

Methanogens could provide the answer to the question I raised earlier - where has all the water on Earth come from? Methanogens use hydrogen and carbon dioxide as their sole energy source.

 

4H2 + CO2 =  CH4 (methane) + 2H20 (water)

 

Sooner or later the methane itself is broken down in the atmosphere by electric storms to carbon dioxide and more water vapour.

 

So the presence and quantity of water/ice on a planetary body may be directly related to its biomass of methanogens and the time frame they have been established there.   

 

 

On a gas planet like Uranus or Jupiter having a dearth of hydrogen (75% hydrogen in their atmospheres, remember) and carbon dioxide, trillions of methanogens, over a period of several billion years could create millions of tons of water.

So the presence of vast amounts of water or ice may be indicative of these forms of life on other Solar bodies. Examples are Io and Europa, the moons of Jupiter.

 

 

Methanogens are omnipresent in every anaerobic situation, even deep down in the crust of our planet. It is quite feasible that, they alone, produced all this water.

 

So methanogens will have evolved in an environment where the resources they need are plentiful. These are predominantly carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen. They are capable of withstanding temperatures much higher than we would expect for the existence of life. They can also survive in diverse pH levels.

 

They are anaerobic and therefore able to survive deep in the planet’s crust. Is this environment a description of the core crust of a gas planet like Jupiter? It could be. Very little light, if any, would penetrate the dust contaminated clouds enveloping a huge planet like Jupiter. The atmospheric pressure there at the crust surface would be enormous - due to the weight of the hydrogen envelope bearing down on it. This would mean that the environment in which the earliest organisms emerged would have been very different from the one previously conceived.

 

Tests have been carried out recently to determine how much pressure certain bacteria can withstand. Two species of microbes were tested using a diamond anvil which can deliver compression 16,000 times higher than normal sea level pressure. This is equivalent  to the pressure of a column of sea water 160 kilometre high. About 1% of Shewanella oneidensis survived these conditions for 30 hours (Sharma, Scott, et al 2002). Current research is being carried out on microbes which inhabit the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Earth’s oceans. These creatures, with their ability to withstand extreme pressure environments, are known as piezophiles. Peeples and Fang are studying the structure of cell membranes under these conditions to understand why their lipids do not become crystalline, but retain their fluid state.

 

All aspects of cell structure may have indeed evolved in the context of extreme conditions, far different from what is required in today’s world.

 

Let us try to estimate the atmospheric pressure at the crustal surface of Jupiter. Assuming that the central accreted part of Jupiter is roughly the size of Mars (2110 miles radius) the atmosphere of Jupiter would be about 42313 miles deep (radius of Jupiter is 44423 miles). The atmosphere on Earth is about ten miles deep and on sea level it is defined as one atmosphere. So Jupiter, if it had the same atmospheric gas composition would be equivalent to 4231 atmospheres pressure. However, hydrogen is a much lighter gas than the air mixture found on Earth which comprises some 78% nitrogen. The double molecule of nitrogen is about 26 times heavier than the double molecule of hydrogen. Let us say hydrogen is about one twenty fifth of the weight of the air mixture. This would reduce the atmospheric pressure on the Jupiter crust to about 169 atmospheres. This may seem a fairly high figure - but remember that life at the bottom of the deepest oceans can withstand pressures 800 times normal atmospheric pressure. As mentioned previously, tests with diamond anvils showed that some archaic life can withstand pressures up to 16000 atmospheres.

 

If this figure of 169 atmospheres is of the right order, it would not be sufficient to liquefy hydrogen isothemically.This would mean we would have to dispense with the theory that Jupiter has a liquefied hydrogen envelope around its core region.

 

If we accept Mars is at a subsequent growth stage of the planetary lifecycle from Jupiter, we could look for signs on its surface which may suggest these high atmospheric pressure conditions. Curiously, a characteristic of Martian volcanoes is their flattened appearance. Although they are enormous in size - up to  26 kilometres high their - their sides have a slope of only about 3 degrees. Another interesting feature on Mars is the scarp surrounding the largest volcano, Olympus Mons. This is a 7 km high cliff - something you would associate with the effects of deep water erosion. Other volcanoes are almost as flat as pancakes. Some of the volcanoes are on huge bulges of the Martian crust. The really flat volcanoes like Tyrrhena Patera  would perhaps have been built up below the enormous force of an  excessive atmospheric pressure. These huge volcanoes would have spewed out ash in vast quantities which would have been whipped up by the 700 mph winds, characteristic of the Jupiter stage. Jupiter’s clouds of many shades of red and brown could be the result of dust contamination from massive, active volcanoes on its crustal surface.

 

Into the Light

 

If we continue to place the evolution and development of life chronologically into the scheme of planetary metamorphosis, early multi-cellular life would have emerged when the Earth was intermediate between the Uranus and Saturn stages.

 

At the stage where all the hydrogen dissipates from a planet like Jupiter, a naked core would be left exposed to light from the Sun. This would be a gradual process but any microbial life would need to adapt to a new environment of increasing exposure to sunlight and also the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen. The microbes we have on Earth evolved in response to the constraints of this changing environment. They produced macro-chemicals which were effective in shielding them from these new hazards.

 

Research on the evolution of chlorophyll by Koziol et al 2007) suggests that it could have evolved initially as a protective mat to shield the organisms against sun light stress. Indeed, some carotinoids in early organisms are purely photo-protective in function. So light harvesting chlorophyll may have evolved from carotinoids. In time, light energy was harnessed to power chemical reactions. The first proto-chlorophyll would possibly have enveloped the organism as an ‘umbrella’ shading it from sun rays by quenching the light energy.

 

We can infer that light harvesting chlorophyll will have emerged when the Earth was losing its covering of contaminated hydrogen gas, just after the Jupiter stage of the Earth’s planetary lifecycle. If my time scale calculations are correct, this could be about 1700 to 1900 million years ago?  

 

These organisms would accelerate the loss of hydrogen from the planet’s atmosphere because their end products of photosynthesis (oxygen and water vapour) would displace hydrogen. Hydrogen makes its way to the top of other gases like nitrogen and oxygen. So hydrogen, with its low specific gravity, would be displaced to the outer edges of the new atmosphere. Here it could be wafted away more easily by the solar wind.

 

Remember, the earliest multi-cellular life took a billion years to evolve from single celled life-forms. It took this time for the elaborate process of cell differentiation to come about. So this basic multi-cellular stage would emerge about 2.5 billion years ago. This process refined itself incrementally so that by about 700 million years ago the first bilaterally symmetrical ‘worm’ prototype had evolved. These were the forerunners of most animal types from crustaceans, insects, fish and reptiles onwards. This period would correspond with the Earth in an orbital position just this side of where Mars is now - about 1.4 AU instead of 1.52 AU.

 

The Earth would be gradually getting warmer by now as it reaches a critical orbital distance from the Sun. It would be expanding and magma flows from volcanism in mid ocean ridges would also raise temperatures of certain microclimates - even though the oceans were perhaps still frozen over.

 

If the oceans were really cold, this could provide an explanation for why many tiny creatures encapsulated themselves in a calcareous coat. The Coccalithophores like Emiliania spp are single celled algae, and it was these types of creatures which led to the formation of chalk and limestone beds, as they died and settled to the bottom of the oceans in vast numbers - over a period of millions of years.

 

Perhaps by having an external coat, these cells could more easily regulate their internal temperature - and avoid freezing in the extreme conditions.

 

It was only about 380 mya when the first land tetrapods (as amphibians) came ashore. This was undoubtedly in the warmest part of the Earth - around the equator. By then the Earth would be  about 1.56 AU away from the Sun. These animals are likely to be derived from fish living in warm shallow lakes in the equatorial region - rather than from predecessors in the still very cold oceans.

 

It was stated recently by a well known Earth Scientist on a TV programme that conditions on Earth used to be a lot colder and this was due to the Sun not burning as bright as it does now! I think he was talking about fairly recent times too. I cannot figure out how the Sun could have, at some stage, ‘switched on another bar !! Surely the Earth could only get warmer by approaching closer to the Sun?

 

Now we come to the important question - How long have we got left before conditions on Earth, due to the proximity to the Sun, become unsustainable?

 

Venus may be 200 million years ahead of us, but as stated previously, the environment on Venus has been hostile for perhaps millions of years. If we look at the graph below, it suggest that the turning point at which the Earth will start  to decay is only 116 million years away. The planet will be inhospitable in many areas long before that time.

 

So perhaps we have only 80 - 90 million years of anything like an equable climate. The ice caps will melt entirely and many land masses will be covered by a much higher sea level. A broad equatorial belt will be the first area to become really inhospitable.

 

 

Aspects which appear to support the Theory of Planetary Metamorphosis

 

1. The Earth’s Moon is very similar to Mercury

 

Both are very heavily cratered, have no tectonic activity, no magnetism, have large iron cores with a thin silicate shell, and are of similar size.

 

Mercury has a diameter of 3032 miles

The Moon is slightly smaller at 2159 miles

 

One would predict the Moon to be smaller because, if it formerly orbited the Sun, it will have approached nearer the Sun than Mercury is now.  Remember that I mentioned that at this stage of Planetary Metamorphosis, the planets are reducing in size - perhaps by sublimation or sputtering.

 

Earth’s diameter is  7926 miles

Venus’ diameter is  7521 miles  

 

The relationship between diameter of the planet and distance from the Sun is shown in the following graph. We can speculate that the final position the Moon reached from the Sun could have been 25.6  x 10 to the power of 6 miles. Pluto, being even smaller may have reached a final position of 22.1 x 10 to the power of 6, miles from the Sun. Mercury’s position is now  36 x  10 to the power of 6, miles from the Sun.

 

Mercury is still rotating, albeit very slowly. Its ‘day’ length is 4222.6 hours - so all surfaces will  take a burning from the Sun. The Moon during its very last years will have stopped rotating and would have presented one side to the Sun permanently.

 

This one-sided exposure to the nearby Sun could have caused the irregular crater patterning distinctive of the Moon.

 

2. Planetary Metamorphosis offers a plausible origin for rocky cosmic debris, asteroids, comets and the moons of many planets.

 

It suggests that they are the remains of earlier planets. Asteroids and comets and other debris would form when a planet enters the critical Roche Radius of its primary. Tidal gravitational forces  from the primary overcome the gravitational forces holding the planet together and so it starts to disintegrate. Wikipedia explain this phenomenon  at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit

 

We can estimate that Mercury would start to destruct when it gets within a million miles of the Sun.

 

3. Planetary debris could have been the vehicle for the ‘panspermia ’ of methanogens which could have evolved on a previous planet. Methanogens deep within asteroids may have seeded a young Earth some four billion years ago. Other planets and their satellites may have been seeded  too. This would explain methane atmospheres, and water/ frozen over oceans on Ceres, Europa and Io. Even Mars may have been infected and this could explain recently observed methane plumes.

 

4. Planetary metamorphosis would explain why the day lengths here on planet Earth are increasing each year. The Earth’s rotation is slowing down as it gets closer to the Sun and as a consequence, the Moon is moving away from our planet. The latter has been confirmed by laser reflectors which have been placed on the Moon.

 

5. A 400% increase in the surface area of our Earth over the last 350 million years by ‘Clamshell Expansion’ and other expansion events in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean areas has come about by hydraulic forces building up below the Earth’s crust.

 

All the landmasses fit together perfectly on an Earth 50% its current diameter.

 

Pangea describes this former integument of the Earth.

 

Laurasia and Gondwanaland  simply describe the two components of the initial ‘Clamshell’ Expansion - with the first new ocean beds forming between them.

 

From the small Earth model (Pangean Earth at 50%) we can extrapolate back to previous smaller diameters.

 

If we examine the Pangean small Earth model and define the ancient cratons on each continent, we can easily identify that they in turn would assemble together on an even smaller globe - 35% of the Earth’s. The integument of this smaller globe would represented the super-continent Rodinia.

 

From this we deduct that Pangea’s continents are Rodinia’s continents (cratons) + stretched peripheries of Rodinia’s continents (basins and/or mobile belts).

 

These areas of the Earth’s crust have stretched in a similar way toffee bars stretch when pulled apart. The profile of the stretched crust is thinner than that of the intact crust.

 

On the model, these stretched areas on the Pangean integument are :-

 

Most significantly along the southern edge of the Euro- Asian landmass.

Proportionately around each other continent.

 

There is no other simple explanation for stretching to occur other than those hydraulic forces described above. Volcanism and the making of new ocean beds by successive magma deposition requires the pressures of this hydraulic model.

 

6. A smaller, younger Earth would likely have been covered entirely with water and this would explain the sedimentary structures found on all the major landmasses.

 

The Ocean waters would likely have a thick covering of ice over them in most areas - except for perhaps within a belt some 15 degrees either side of an equator.  This equator will have been placed in a position, geographically different from the present one.

 

In time as the Earth expanded, land masses would begin to emerge and these new shore lines would be quickly exploited

by ‘amphibious’ forms of life, both plant and animal.

 

Chronologically this ties in with the emergence of the first land animals.

 

7.  Fossil Rugose corals from the Devonian Period, 360 million years ago show 400 growth rings per year (John Wells). These corals add a new ring each day - which suggests that at that time there were 400 days to a year. This means  that the Earth must have been much further away from the Sun than it is today as planets, more distal from the Sun, have faster rotation periods and hence shorter ‘days’.

 

It could be that the fossil corals are confirming that planets are  migrating in ‘lock-step’ towards the Sun and are doing so at the rate of something in the order of 55 metres per year.

 

8. Planetary Metamorphosis accounts for the curvature of shield cratons. If the craton structures were the original integument of a smaller Earth they would naturally have the greater curvature of the smaller radius.The lower density material of the ancient craton ensures that they rise up and ‘float’ on the mantle as the planet grows in diameter.

 

Sediments, some of the most ancient sediments on Earth, are found on top of  ancient shield cratons  and they follow the curvature of the craton, suggesting that oceans covered the smaller Earth (Rodinian Earth), entirely. These can be observed in many areas of the World - but the Canning Basin, Western Australia is a good example.

The Grand Canyon also provides a unique peek into deep sedimentary strata and the sunken edge of the craton it overlays. Cratonic materials like the Vishnu schists are 1.7 billion years old and along with the immediately overlaying limestone, they offer an accurate assessment of the  time Rodinian Earth existed with a smaller radius.

 

A precise account of the Grand Canyon geography and geology is given at Bob Ribokas’ web-site:

 

http:www.bobspixels.com/kaibab.org/geology/gc_layer.htm  

 

I was unable to contact him directly for permission to use his geological section of the Grand Canyon, and hope he does not mind me using it to depict my schematic illustration of the  Rodinian and Pangean sedimentation events.  

 

Pangean Earth’s integument was formed from Rodinian Earth’s crust being stretched apart at weakened areas.The stretching thinned out the profile of the crust thus forming saucer-like (basins) depressions in the crust where marine sediment collects.

 

The stretched parts of the ancient crust (shown in yellow in the diagram below) are areas which are easily distorted and folded when subjected to tectonic stresses from sea-bed spreading.

This ties in with mountain building in these areas, eg. The Andes, the Rockies, the Alps and Himalayas - to name just a few mountain ranges on these weakened  (fatigued ) edges of the cratons.

 

From this it follows that the ocean ridges, the sources of lateral sea-bed formation, are all situated at the middle points of these weakened basins. As the planet has hydraulically expanded from the Pangean Earth stage, these stretched and fatigued archaic crustal  surfaces have reached their limits of ductility and finally snapped.

 

9. Planetary Metamorphism  enhances ‘The Snowball Earth’ theory.

 

I t suggests the Earth, some 280 mya, was further away from the Sun than it is now. This would  mean a much cooler Earth, covered mostly in ice, leaving a narrow equatorial band with a sub-tropical climate. The equator, often referred to as the Pennsylvanian Equator was almost perpendicular to the present one.

 

It was this swampy environment and its vegetation which gave rise to the bituminous coal measures which are found worldwide.

 

10.  Planetary Metamorphosis and its smaller Earth restores the continuity and integrity of the Permian equatorial coal band.

 

On an 80% diameter model of the Earth, the Permian coalfields are aligned into a narrow band which runs from eastern Australia, through South Africa, Brazil, Pennsylvania (USA), Novascotia (Canada), Northern Russia (Gory Byrranga),Siberia, China to Viet Nam , across some new crustal area (the beginnings of the Pacific Ocean floor) and  back to Queensland, Australia.

 

11.  My small Earth model suggests that the western mobile belt of North America (West of the Rockies) has moved in the opposite direction to the rest of the continent by some 1500 km. in a complex slip fault system. Geological information is well documented on this phenomenon which is still in progress today. The model is an extrapolation of this movement process back to a period, 200 million + years ago.

 

Mechanism of  Expansion?

 

If we now accept that our Earth has gradually increased its radius over the last four to five billion years (less than 2 mm per year) it must be now reasoned how this planetary growth has come about.

 

There has been an increase in mass as well as an increase in volume and so the process must be regarded as planetary growth rather than expansion.

 

The process is obviously much more complex than the addition of successive layers of cosmic dust  - like the layers of an onion. The problem is that we have cratons of up to 3 billion years old - quite near the surface (even at the surface in some areas) when, theoretically, they should be half way down to the centre of the Earth.

 

If we examine the Grand Canyon we can view a span of 1.25 billion years  (adding uppermost layers which have disappeared with erosion) from top to bottom. This time span is covered in a depth of about 2.4 kilometres; it should theoretically cover a distance of 1600 km!

 

The first crustal surfaces of the Earth were formed from less dense but ductile materials. As the planet grew, this crustal material was buoyant and hence floated to the top of the mantle which somehow was adding mass. This process is illustrated in the above diagram, and elegantly explains the formation of shield archons within continental crust. These cratons are flanked by stretched crustal material which formed basins between shields. As the Earth grew internally, some of these stretched crust areas ruptured in turn and ocean-bed formation was built between two stretched pieces of crust.

 

So the mass is somehow being added from below the crust.

 

 

From cosmic particles?

 

The Solar wind contains particles, electrons and elements stripped of their electrons These particles are now described as plasma  - a  ‘fourth state’ of matter - different from gases, liquids or solids. Some of the plasma is alien - having entered our solar system from other parts of the galaxy. Plasma is the most common state in the Universe and comprises some 98%.

 

In addition there is debris from asteroids and meteors, varying in size from molecular  to 1 micron.  

 

Much of this matter is deflected away from Earth by a huge magnetosphere as shown in the following illustration.

 

 

 

 

However, there are two areas where cosmic matter and energy can enter into the Earth. These are at the magnetic poles.

 

Plasma is directed along magnetic lines into these two areas. This ingress of plasma in a jet form causes the familiar auroras where atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen ions are bombarded and excited into a state where they give off light.

 

No research has been undertaken yet - as far as I can determine - into the amount of plasma which enters the Earth each year.

 

Small charged particles (spherules) of magnetite, iron oxide,are also pulled in to the magnetic poles in vast quantities. McCorkely et al,1976, estimate that quantities of magnetite spherules deposited each year on Earth are around half a million tons.

It could be these particles, which are entering the magnetic poles of the Earth are pulled by magnetic flux into the mantle areas, and  add mass to the Earth from beneath the crust. From here the Iron is pulled towards the core by gravity. Adding mass to a rotating object - like a wheel - slows it down. Adding mass to the Earth explains why it is gradually slowing down.

 

There is a continuous ionisation process of atoms and molecules in the solar system. Non-charged debris/dust from the cosmos is attracted to the Earth by gravitational pull. The quantities of this material are vast and difficult to measure. We can,at present, only detect the ionised particles.  As the neutral particles reach the ionosphere, some become electrically charged as ions. From here on the Earth’s magnetic field can suck in these charged particles at its polar regions, negatively charged ions at the North Pole and positively charged ions at the South Pole.

 

Ions of all species can travel along magnetic flows under the Earth’s crust  and finally meet each other to form compounds below the equatorial  belt. Heat is developed from chemical combination as new compounds are formed - producing magma and hydraulic pressures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mercury

Venus