CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The planet Venus, which has been shown to have had its share of astroblemes, lightning activity, melting, volcanos, plateaus, mountain ranges, great valleys, and closed depressions or basins, has a "curious dearth of great basins," whence we surmise that Venus never underwent the trauma of Earth, which resulted in most of the Earth being ocean basins. "The tectonic forces that have shaped the surface of Venus have raised only 5 percent of the surface into 'continental masses' and left only 15 to 20 percent of it as basins... " [1] Nor do we know whether these are "real" basins, that is, distinct from the continental material as they are on Earth.
The ocean's "trackless wastes" may be a nice metaphor for the 71% of the Earth's surface covered by water, but the ocean bottoms are marked by enough signs to revolutionize the earth sciences and natural history. Essentially the ocean basins are three in number, the Pacific, the Indian and the Atlantic. The Pacific Basin was the recent scene of the most awesome event ever to have befallen the Earth since its early times, the outburst of the Moon. The Indian Ocean appears to have been created at the same time by the migration of continental land driven to the scene of the disaster. The Atlantic Ocean was rather obviously originated from a great wedge that helped propel the continents east and west so as to distribute the mass, heat, and electrical charge rather more evenly in the expansion and filling initiated in the evacuated areas.
The only possible mechanism for the lunar outburst would involve an exoterrestrial body, to which I have alluded on several previous occasions. The clearest description of the event and the closest to our own theory was provided by Howard B. Baker in an obscurely published article of 1952 [2] . He was an American geologist, who from 1909 worked on the problem and completed a manuscript in 1932 that was never published. Both works were discovered by the present author after the manuscript to Chaos and Creation was completed; no changes were needed as a result, except to credit Baker for his achievement.
Baker stipulated an eccentrically orbiting planet, "Pentheus," as the intruder, and illustrated
how by perturbative increase of orbital eccentricity alone, without any alteration of mean distance ... an orbit of mean distance 3 (astronomical units) might be so displaced that perihelion would be tangent to the Earth's orbit and aphelion well into Jupiter's danger zone, that is, greater than Jupiter's perihelion distance, which is 4.95...
The planetary disturber is conceived to have been broken up by gravitational encounter with Jupiter, as suggested by Jeans (1934), and much of its ocean water, frozen with sand, gravel, and other debris, continued on a cometary orbit. The Earth occasionally met with these showers during the Pleistocene glacial epoch.
The Roche limit, as explained by Jeans (1934, p. 269), is 2.49 times the radius of the larger of two bodies in an expanded or a contracted state as computed to make the density the same as that of the smaller body. With equal densities, the volume and mass are both represented by the same figure and are proportioned to the cube of the diameter.
Thus Earth, with mass 1 and diameter 1, and a radius of about 4000 miles, would encounter Pentheus with a mass 27 times greater, a diameter 3 times longer, and a radius of 12,000 miles. In this case, the Roche limit would be 2.45 X 12,000 or 29,400 miles from center.
As Pentheus progressed in its orbit it occupied a path 58,800 miles wide, within which no body much smaller could survive. The earth is conceived to have been deeply touched on the Pacific side by the Roche limit of the larger planet at the latter's perihelion... with the result that the Moon was born... If Pentheus were a mass of 64, radius 16,000 miles, its Roche limit would be of 39,200 miles.
Baker's model path calls for a two hour passby between 10 PM and 12 PM, at a perihelion velocity of 23.5 miles per second. A bulge distending the Earth appears at l0 PM with a tide raising power 225,425 times that of the Moon. At 11 PM the Roche limit is almost tangential to the Earth with a power of 816,818. At midnight, the tide power is 1,170,701 times that of the Moon and the Roche limit embraces the whole outbursting section of Earth, which then escapes into space. The Earth has lost most of its crust, but has gained water and a fall-out of rock.
Baker does not use the electrical power that would also operate effectively to the same end as gravitation. The distance might be several times farther given the same masses, if the intruder had come from afar bearing an electrical potential much different from the Earth's charge. Also the model proposed by this author is of a more gaseous and heavily electrified body. Its detailed treatment is available in Solaria Binaria and it ought perhaps not be discussed further in these pages, whose subject is the bottom of the oceans.
The prevalent view of sea-floor spreading has molten material exuding from the great oceanic ridge volcanos, pushing into place as a strip and jostling the older strips that compose the floor to move further away from the ridges. Ocean floor chronology and drift theory are based upon observations that from one strip to another, every several "millions" of years, there occurs a magnetic field reversal.
However, besides the other problems, which I have recounted, one core (395 A) from the Atlantic ridge flank shows magnetic differences in depth; the upper 170 meters is normally magnetized, the next 310 meters is reversed: and the following 40 meters is again normal [3] . This is an unwelcome surprise to chronometry and the theory of convection currents.
Still, pursuant to our theory here, we should expect erratic magnetic effects to accompany the great outpourings of lava; as soon as a batch is dumped off the ridge it hardens with the magnetic orientation of the moment. Very soon, before it has moved away, another batch is dumped on top of it, then another, all occurring before the whole thickness of lava moves far enough to be free of additional burdening. If, as we think, the ocean basins could mostly be paved in a thousand years, during which time the Earth's field would be moving geographically and oscillating, the laminated magnetic structure of the floor must follow.
Allen Cox points out that "if sea-floor spreading has occurred at a constant rate, the marine magnetic profiles may be interpreted to yield a reversal time scale going back 75 million years. The apparent average duration of the polarity intervals was greater during the time 10.6< t< 45 million years than during the past 10.6 million years, and during the time 45< t< 75 million years the average length was still greater." [4] That is, periods between reversals of the Earth's magnetic field occupy ever broader stripes or bands on the ocean bottoms as we go back in time.
Cox realizes that this might be an effect of an inconstant rate but dismisses the idea. With our larger theory that negative exponential rates followed a catastrophic opening of the basins, we find this data supportive. The ocean basins opened fast and then ever more slowly, giving the appearance of a magnetic field that used to reverse more slowly than it does now.
The Arctic Ocean scarcely deserves the name [5] . The North Pole area is flatter than the lands to the south and some miles lower than the swollen equatorial belt. If it were not so, there would be no Arctic Ocean. By far the greatest pan of the Arctic Ocean floor is continental shelf, less than 300 meters below sea level. There are half a dozen abyssal plains with depths from 2700 meters to 5000 meters. The Mid-Atlantic ridge forks northwards around Greenland and the two prongs come close together north of Greenland, then move in parallel across the ocean bed sandwiching the North Pole abyssal plain between them. A third "Alpha Cordillera" meanders northwest from the North Greenland regroupment, with many seamounts. The three ridges enter the continental shelf of northeast Siberia. They seem to disappear. But the Nansen Cordillera moves into the continental shelf in a great "Sadko Trough" and, precisely in line with it, some 400 km on, there begins the delta of the Lena River and a great valley, probably a rift valley. This rift cuts down through Asia ultimately to join the Indian Ocean ridges.
Throughout the Arctic ocean bed the continental mass rises abruptly above the abyssal plains. Sheer cliffs of over 2000 meters are the rule. Although, on the one hand, a defender of erosionary theory would offer in explanation that the solid ice cover has preserved the "original" morphology, it may be argued that the fractures are new, occurred when the ice cap avalanched in Lunarian times and then were covered up during the Saturnian-Jovian age-breaking events that included a new ice cover, the present one. Semi-tropical, fully human cultures have been uncovered in islands only a few hundred kilometers from the North Pole. Iceland is apparently a high element along the North Atlantic (Reykjanes) ridge, volcanically produced.
Figure A :
Sketch of the main ridges and fractures of the Pacific Indian ocean bottom with main trenches. Possible
Trans Asian and Trans-Euro-Mediterranean rifts are added to the
drawing, which is adapted from O. G. Sorochtin, ed., Geophysics
of the Ocean (in Russian), vol. II, fig. 17. The lithosphere (crust) is everywhere shallowest beneath the ridge lines.
Thousands of seamounts shooting up from the ocean bottoms are not drawn here.
FIGURE B (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The Arctic Hemisphere, indicating the largely continental (rather than basaltic ocean-type) bottom; and the North Atlantic Ridge passing by the North Pole and proceeding towards Siberia, where possibly it becomes a land rift proceeding to the Indian Ocean via Lake Baikal. (Pages B to F are author's sketches. In all of them, the outlines of the full continents, including shallow shelves, are drawn.)
FIGURE C (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The Indian Ocean Hemisphere, noting the African Rift on the extreme left, the East Ninety Degrees Ridge, and the largely continental rock platforms that underlie the vast Asia-Australia area.
FIGURE D (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The American Hemisphere, noting how both the Atlantic and mid-Pacific Ridges follow the shape of South America at great distances. A world-circling Tethyan shallow sea belt may once have passed through Central America, the Mediterranean and the South Seas, but can hardly be discerned because the ocean bottom growth and expansion and crustal slippages have largely erased it.
FIGURE E (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The Antarctic Hemisphere, showing how ridge-fracture cut the south polar Continent off completely from all land to the North, as by a circular saw. It would appear that the main fractures occurred before the main continental shift, (as in the Arctic Basin to the South), because there still is a semblance of order to their progression around Greenland and into Asia. Furthermore, Greenland adheres in shape to the North American continent and its neighboring western fracture does not seem to descend as deep as the eastern one. And on its East, Greenland seems conformable to the Scandinavian platform.
The simplest scenario for the mass movements that created the Arctic basin would call for a fracture, a swinging down of North America with a widening of the fracture valleys to create the abyssal plains. Northeastern North America was stretched out; Greenland and the many Canadian islands moved more slowly. Later Asia pushed northwards at one point in its generally southeast torque -the Yermak underseas Plateau -almost restoring contact with North America (Greenland) but letting the great ridge system pass through.
The total true ocean area created by and in consequence of the explosions and worldwide venting system amounts to 310 millions km 2 . Its depth averages 4 km. A floor of 1.24 billion km 3 would have been laid almost entirely in a period of about 2000 years. After that time, the activity of basin-evolution would begin quickly to subside. The basins would continue to evolve at a greatly reduced rate. Most of the vents would have become inoperative. The ridges and fissures are still expanding around the globe but at a scarcely discernible rate; like today, rarely would the oceanic surfaces be troubled by seabottom volcanism and spreading.
A full life would have arisen in the warm oceans; the marine species of today originated in the shallow Tethyan waters. Men began navigating the oceanic surfaces now. Whereas ancient fossilized life-forms have been discovered on high mountains, they are absent from the bottom of the sea. It is presumptive, if not incorrect, for geological writings to state that the oceans have covered and uncovered the land on several lengthy occasions. The mountains have arisen from the shallow waters of Pangea, bearing the fossils, or the fossils have been laid down by flooding and tides, or they have been dropped by cyclones. The abysses of the ocean contain only species whose origins in shallower waters are patent. The oceans were born recently, and therefore hold only what has lived in these times. Heezen and Hollister, recounting the scarce record available of life on the ocean bottoms, conjecture that "either there was no abyss then, or the relicts of these ancient seas have been completely destroyed. The deposits of earlier seas are found exclusively on the continents." To us it is clear that these earlier "seas" were the only "ancient seas" and were the shallow Tethyan seas and swamps.
The length of the oceanic fractures and their transverse fissures (transform faults) amounts to some 300,000 linear kilometers. The funnel volcanos number in the tens of thousands. The emission from a volcano cone can be given a value equivalent to 5 kilometers of fissure volcanism, and the number, never counted, can be set at 50,000. Then 550,000 kilometers of venting area was available to produce on the average 2,254.5 km 3 of ocean floor per venting kilometer within 2,000 years, or an average of 1,127 km 3 per year.
In two days in 1902, the Volcano of Santa Maria in Guatamala erupted and emitted 5.5 km 3 of material. A fissure of Laki, Iceland, part of the Atlantic northeast ridge forking, was quite active in 1783 and along a 25 km line emitted 15 km 3 of material in 4 1/ 2 months. In the tenth century an Icelandic fissure one year erupted 9 km 3 of lava alone along a 30 km trench. It is evident that if its activity were continuous at its full rate of eruption, the fissure of Laki would eject about 3,000 km 3 in 1000 years, 9000 km 3 in 3000 years, far more than its quota.
The figure used as a base requirement, 1.24 billion km 3 , is twice as large as required. The underside of the ocean floor, comprising half the thickness of the floor, appears to be not a product of lava flow but a melting and cooling of basaltic rock in place. As the gaps widened, and the lava flowed to fill the chasm, the floor of the chasm at first softened from the heat all around it and from the waters, and then quickly hardened beneath the lava flows. This is but the cooled crust of the exposed magma of the mantle. When geologists declare, as does Shelton, that "... we cannot yet explain why magma exists where it does or seeks escape when it does," [6] they are not considering this kind of quantavolutionary and exponential solution.
The continents can be viewed as the rims of the ocean basins. They are steep-sided blocks, whether they plunge directly into the waters or have sea-covered shelves that then plunge down. The continental slopes, on the other hand, are water-covered moraines of continental debris laying on top of ocean abyssal basalt. They have a triangular profile, making nearly a right angle where continental block meets ocean floor; the hypotenuse is a lengthy stretch moving from the top of the shelf at an angle of 5 ° on the average. The declining rate of expansion of the ocean floor contributed to the profile of the slopes. By moving first rapidly, then ever more slowly, they heighten the illusion that a gradual off-flow of sediments has created the sloping figure. More likely exponentially declining rates of continental debris and seabottom spread worked together to provide the profile. Deep river canyons extend hundreds of kilometers into them. Elephant teeth are found far out on the slopes at great depth; probably the slopes were laid down, occupied by terrestrial life forms, and then lately flooded. Deep turbidity currents, if they were to transport them, would bury them or destroy them. They lay near where the elephant died not long ago.
As told in the previous chapter, the continental slopes are free of continental mountains, as are the true ocean bottoms. The logical implications of this fact have evaded geology. If most great mountain ranges are new, whether by our chronological reckoning or by that of conventional geology, why have none appeared on the continental slopes? The answer suggests itself: the mountains rear up at the edge of the precipices of the continents; they dump their debris into the abysses.
Immense floods and tides traversed the continents and poured off the miles-steep continental blocks into the ocean. The canyons occur where the blocks were fractured, and consequently where the waters poured out most heavily. The canyons, which will be treated soon in more detail, were not submerged beneath the oceans until the ocean basins stopped growing and their waters crept up upon the continental blocks and shelves. The seas do not come in and kidnap the land; they beat back the detritus and even build land. Thus the great slopes could not have formed under uniformitarian conditions or even underwater.
Prolonged, universal run-off of deluge and catastrophic tidal water produced slopes; the blocks were often towering water falls, dropping sheets of slurry into the abyss to form the slopes. The coarse gravel typical of the slopes far out to sea signals the impetuous rush and transporting power of the waters going to fill the basins. The scale would have dwarfed even the scene pictured by K. J. Hsh for the Mediterranean Sea (our dates and events differ, of course), "a giant bathtub, with the Straits of Gibraltar as the faucet. Seawater roared in from the Atlantic in a gigantic waterfall." If the falls delivered 10,000 cubic miles of seawater per year, they would have exceeded Niagara Falls 1000 times, and filled the Mediterranean basin in 100 years. "What a spectacle it must have been for the African ape-men, if any were lured by the thunderous roar." [7] The Mediterranean basin requires in its complexity an analysis that we cannot afford here. It appears to have been primordial, that is Pangean, and shallow. Then it may have suddenly closed and as suddenly opened, dry for a few years, and then overwhelmed by floods of water much greater than at present. [8]
The ocean basins are composed of sima, rich in silicon and magnesium elements. They are of basalt. They are igneous, formed in red heat. They are thin. They are denser than the continental sial. The continents probably sit upon similar material, but much deeper, perhaps directly upon the upper mantle, save where the magma of the mantle may have expanded and intruded upon the continental granites.
The continents and the ocean basins are distinct formations that were produced at different times and by different mechanisms. The sial is old. The sima is new. The fact that the shell of the ocean bottoms is only one-tenth as thick as that of the continents in itself suggests that the ocean crust is the product of a melt, that the seas are new, and that the continents were somehow in a position to resist complete volcanism or explosion. The fact that ocean crust is more basic or less acid than the continental crust indicates that it separated from the primeval melt after the granitic crust; so says M. Cook.
The continents were produced by a cooling of the Earth's surface and by their own erosion and debris, and in direct contact with ultra-basic material of a heavier composition. Hence, the igneous marine floor does not cover a former continental surface, and density probes show this to be the case. Nevertheless the floor probably contains continental debris in small amounts. With all the sinking of lands reported in legends, one would expect ocean-bottom drills to collect continental material here and there. Very little appears, leading one to suspect that most sinkings have occurred on the continental slopes or shelves.
The ocean basins are scarcely sedimented; they hold only 1% of all sedimentary materials. Under uniform conditions, this would represent only 16 million years of runoff deposits amounting to 10 18 tons 3 . Dissolved solids in the ocean waters compose 3.5% of their mass, far from making up the difference, nor can these solids be allocated to detritus removed from the continents.
Often the rocks are bare along the circumglobal ridges. They are 20 meters thick or less. The thickest ocean sediments are not on the basins proper but on the continental shelves and slopes. Further, next to these areas where the abyss begins, sedimentation is thicker and can reach 1000 meters in exceptional areas.
All of these oceanic sediments come either from cataclysmic off-pourings from the flooded continents, or from fall-outs, both volcanic and exoterrestrial. Material lagging at the end stream of the fission of the Moon might have dropped back to form islands of continental crust in mid-ocean. The time required for such sedimentation is calculable in a couple of thousand years or less under quantavolutionary conditions.
The character of oceanic sediments varies. It differs markedly from much continental sediment that is rock. It is clay and ooze. The shelves carry clay; the polar regions, the slopes, and some of the abyss carries ooze; and the deep abyss carries clay. The polar basins also carry sand and boulders.
Carbonates are heavy on the shelves and bottom oozes, but compose only from 2 to 10% of the clays (since they dissolve in the colder waters). Layers of distinct calcination and ash are interlarded with the oozes and clays in many parts of the world. An unknown proportion of additional ash has been incorporated chemically into the clay and ooze and remains to be distinguished. Much clay is igneous in origin, a product of volcanic tephra, volcanism, and cosmic fall-out. Much manganese has been precipitated onto rocks, pebbles, fish teeth, and bones over many areas, and pure manganese has been found on the bottom near the ridges.
The towering ridges that girdle the world have flanks that descend gradually. They present almost no underseascape for many hundreds of miles. There is no thickening of the ocean basin crust beneath the ridges, unlike the so-called isostatic thickening beneath the mountains of the continents, much of which is probably due to blunted thrusting. This occurs despite the fact that the ridges rise higher than the continental Alps. Thus they are distinct in origins, as was pointed out in the last chapter. The continental mountains were shaped by horizontal forces, with the intense, sporadic assistance of electro-gravitational forces from outer space. The ridges were formed by vertical forces from within the Earth, with similar assistance; unlike continental mountains, they lack rock roots, evidencing that they were not thrusted.
An impossible predicament is presented to conventional geophysics; how can uniformitarian forces produce this contrast? The continental crust folds and thrusts and compresses into abundant mountains; but the oceanic crust, having made its igneous ridges and seamounts once and for all, slides up and under and around without making mountains, but exudes lava in discrete amounts, and shakes seismically from time to time.
The Pacific Rise conforms generally to what one would expect from an exploded, as contrasted with a cleaved, basin such as the Atlantic. Worthy of quotation here is a passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica (my remarks in brackets):
Fast spreading... as is characteristic of the Pacific [because the basin was already blasted out], produces a rise. Slow spreading... results in the formation of a ridge. Sea-floor spreading is a symmetrical process that accretes new ocean floor equally to both flanks of a rift; [The East Pacific basin obviously did not accrete symmetrically.] When a former landmass splits apart, the ridge maintains a median position as the newly created ocean basin increases in size. This phenomenon occurred in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but, in contrast, the rise in the Pacific did not rift a landmass when it was formed, and consequently there is no reason for it to be median. [Again, no land mass.]
A slash wound upon already swollen human flesh produces a swelling along the line, but a lower ridge than a single slash wound upon healthy flesh; so the Pacific rise is swollen high off the middle of the ocean bottom, and has a less marked ridge from the slash wound cutting it than the Atlantic basin has from its same slashing.
The Earth expanded as well as exploded; whatever can explode can expand: a chapter has been given over to this subject. Although the Pacific Basin is concave, no one can examine a relief map of the Pacific Rise, for example, and say that the volume of the Earth remained unchanged thereby. Since this rise occurred, along with many other bulges, then a considerable expansion might be demonstrated by survey without resorting to theoretical physics. The globe has many slight bulges. Russian geophysicists have recently described its shape as formed by at least two geometric networks of lattices, a many-faceted figure [9] . So there may even be a pattern to the expansion of the global crystal. The latticework can be viewed as expansion joints; the total pattern makes the surface of the globe a set of convex plates rather than a perfect sphere.
Under the conditions imagined here, much of the expansion would be expressed simply in a hurrying of the basin-paving process, accelerated by inrushing waters. The salt of the dropping canopies would also promote magmatic melting. Molten lava takes up more volume than solidified basalt; wherever the crust was boiling, it would expand the surface of the globe. The tidal pulls of the Intruder, temporarily, and the new Moon, permanently, would draw the surface of the Earth outwards; there the surface would pause, cool, and harden.
The ridge mountain volcanos, and the ridge and transverse fault fissure volcanos, differ from tens of thousands of sea mounts, atolls and guyots that rose tall and slumped back upon the escape of the Moon from the Pacific Ocean Basin and smaller crustal material elements elsewhere. Some of these became instantly created volcanos and continued activity after the others had collapsed back. The Pacific seascape differs from the Atlantic by its incomparably more numerous holdings of seamounts. Morphological examination would indicate that the seamounts do not have the extensive piping systems of continental volcanos.
As the main blow struck and the fracture opened in North America, it drove that continent as a block southwestwards until it overrode the East Pacific Rise (fracture) that had just appeared off what was now its west coast. Much of this western area promptly erupted into volcanism and was covered by huge lava flows and extensive, faulted desert plateaus and plains. The Asian and Australasian coasts and islands do not fit into the North American continent because vast spaces opened up and the whole arc from Alaska to Southern Asia broke away with the explosion of the Moon. A boundary ridge is not easily visible but extends down the Pacific basin on the West from Kamchatka Peninsula to the Campbell Plateau and ties into the Emperor Sea volcanic seamounts and the Line Island Ridge.
The Indian Ocean bottom, unlike the Pacific and Atlantic basins, appears to have been well-traveled. Antarctica has been shoved southward some hundreds of kilometers, and girdled by two great ridges. A newly discovered rift pierces the Waddell Sea, probably a transverse fault from the ridge to its north, and is lost under the great ice plateau hundreds of kilometers inland.
Australia has been ushered eastward by a fork of the same fracture that pushed India north and Antarctica south. Indeed, if one wishes an up-to-date definition of the continents of the world, useful for some purposes, one may say that a continent is a body of land surrounded by an oceanic cleavage. Even in the case of Europe and Asia, some believe the fracture to exist, going up from the Indian Ocean through the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the Ural mountains and into the Arctic complex earlier described.
Contemporary geological theory has also traced the path of the Indian subcontinent from Southeast Africa to the Tibetan Plateau. "The vast Himalayan range was created when a plate of the earth's crust carrying the landmass of India collided with the plate carrying Asia some 45 million years ago, having travelled 5,000 kilometers nearly due north, across the expanse now occupied by the Indian Ocean." [10] The drift itself took much longer, since it occurred at the rate of 6 to 16 cm/ year, if one were to accept the belts of magnetic reversals that mark the stretches of ocean bottom along the line of march and the dates given the lava from one belt to the next.
However, cores drilled into the Indian Ocean bed not far from the observed course produced gaps in dating of sediments by fossils of many millions of years, perhaps fifty millions in some cases. "Why these accumulations are missing," commented the directors of the survey, "is at present a mystery." [11] Fifty from a hundred million or so years is a big proportion. That "there are more gaps than record" is, of course, a familiar complaint among paleontologists on land as well as under the sea. In the other great basins, gaps of twenty million years in the fossil record are common. With sediments so thin, the gaps are not so important, say some -a turbidity current or two, and there you are. (Geophysicists and paleontologists can be catastrophists à la minute, when it is demanded of them.)
Still, when there is a gap in the fossil record of between 50 to 70 millions of years ago, we are speaking of late Cretaceous times and of the disastrous end of the dinosaurs and most marine species. A layer of unfossilized chert tiles the floor just above this zone, "as though some catastrophic development killed off most of or much marine life." One begins to suspect that the Cretaceous boundary may be considered as the primeval age of the ocean beds and that all which is found in the abyss arrived there afterwards; further, the finale of the Cretaceous may have been the end of Pangea and the outburst of the Moon, even if both are to be dated at a few thousand years ago. Almost all of the sea floor assigned to a date is Cretaceous or younger [12] .
We mentioned earlier that the Himalayas are agreed to have risen steeply within the last dozen thousand years. We called to the attention of Raikes and other students of the destruction of proto-Indian civilization that their "uplifts" were part of world-wide catastrophe. Today, the people of the southern Himalayas are suffering from a horrendous erosion of their soil. They are blamed for improper farming practices and overpopulation. This may be true enough, but, considering the youngness of this region, it is also fair to suggest that the Himalayan slopes have simply not existed long enough to have come sliding down on their own accord.
The cruxes of the internal activity of the Earth during the lunarian period occurred at two well-marked belts of discontinuity. One is the Moho discontinuity just below the shell in which the oceans and continents are fixed. Here the upper mantle boundary preserves an almost liquid character before it resumes a hotter but hardened condition farther down. This boundary of difference would scarcely be noticeable if it had not marked the torque and twist of the surface in the phases of shock and adjustment. For a simple unagitated melt produces, except in purely statistical terms, an undifferentiated transition of rocks up to the sedimentary level. The Moho boundary marks a breakdown of viscosity on a worldwide scale.
The second crux occurred at the 2900 kilometer-deep level of the lower mantle, some 50.0 kilometers before the upper core's boundary. Suddenly the density index, that had been moving at a fairly even rate of increase through the rocks after leaving the lighter crustal regions, leaps from 5.42 g/ cm 3 to 9.91, a difference of 4.49 g/ cm 3 . This is about one-third of the total value of the scale, which begins at 3.31 and ends at 13.00 at the center of the Earth. No marked changes in pressure, gravitational intensity, or incompressibility are notable at this level. The largest secondary torque of the globe in reaction to axial displacement and rotational torque and retardation happened here. Lesser torques occurred at the 400, 1000, 5000 and 5100 kilometer depths where seismic discontinuities are observed.
Several points deserve stress in reviewing what has just been said and looking ahead to the next chapter.
An immense part of the Earth's shell is simply missing. It had nowhere to go except into space, for it cannot be decomposed, mixed with plutonic material, or shovelled under the sea bottoms.
A psychological fallacy pushes us to believe that the ocean basins were made by and for the primordial waters. That the basins exist is one accident; that waters fill the basins is another accident. The accidents added up to a "miracle" of good fortune for mankind. Better near extinction than a totally frozen or drowned globe. At first, the waters were below the rims of the basins; now they slop over the rims.
The East Atlantic Basin corresponds to the West Atlantic Basin. Their former juncture is plain. The Pacific Ocean is deeper. The East Pacific Basin is sharply marked where the southern, western and northern margins are arranged as a giant set of arcs detached from a blasted area.
All the ocean basins are young, thin, and scarcely sedimented. Oceanographers who recently discovered these facts were amazed; in a few years, the basins became four billion years younger. Only potassium-argon datings, which are vulnerable to catastrophic events, let the bottoms achieve even this young age. The basins are not 200 millions as against 4,500 million years old. They maybe only aged a dozen millennia. The surprise is greater: not one-thirtieth as old, but one-ten-thousandth as old.
Three additional, related points are stressed in other works of the author and have only been mentioned in this book:
Despite the almost total destruction of the biosphere by heat, explosion, suffocation, and famine, many species survived. Marine life soon found vast new breeding grounds. So did plants and land animals. Even before they were drowned in the later deluges, the cooled seamounts harbored many forms of land life on their summits.
Horrified, stunned, fully human beings saw all of this happen. Wherever archaeology finds "paleolithic" and "early neolithic" sites, it finds not slow soil coverings but fast disaster coverings. Much legendary and physical evidence points to a newly emplaced Moon and a worldwide catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago.
The network of fractures around the world is unitary. Mechanically it must be considered as the effect of one and the same event. The Moho discontinuity recorded today beneath the Earth's shell at from 5 to 50 kilometers depth may denote where the shell rafted and where it was peeled off. The next two chapters deal explicitly with the fracture and rift system of the world.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-one: Ocean Basins)
1. Richard A. Kerr, "Venus...," 207 Science (18 Jan. 1980), 291.
3. "Testing Vine-Matthews," Open Earth 3 (Apr. 1979), 28-9.
5. See National Geographic Magazine, map, "Arctic Ocean Floor" (Wash. D. C., 1976).
7. "When the Mediterranean Dried Up," Sci. Amer. (Dec. 1972), 33
8. E. Smith 28 Sea Frontiers (1982), 66-74.
9. Chris Bird, New Age J., 36-41.
10. D. P. McKenzie and J. G. Schlater, "Evolution of the Indian" Sci. Amer. (May 1973), 63.