Crustal Curvature

I realize that I have been bandying about the concepts of crustal shift and crustal curvature fairly freely recently, and unless you have gone back through my core article on the Pleistocene nonconformity and additional discussions sprinkled through this blog, you may be in difficulty. A little definition needs to be refreshed and perhaps tightened up.

First, a crustal shift is a movement of the entire crust of the Earth as a thin one hundred mile thick or so layer of crustal material that we are familiar with as a single unit. It is a little bit like the rind of an orange on the Earth’s core. It is possible because there is a thin layer of molten carbon at the interface between the core and the crust. At rare intervals some of this carbon rockets to the surface at the rate of seventy or so miles per hour to form diamond pipes. This also confirms near zero viscosity as might also be theoretically expected from our knowledge of carbon behavior. Recall also that carbon has the highest known melting point and this is the reason it can be brought down to this depth.

Once the crust is in motion this rind conflicts with the fact that the earth is not a perfect sphere, but is larger around the equator that around the poles. This ultimately acts to halt the motion rather quickly as the carbon layer get pinched off through the motion of the crust. This plausibly places an upper limit on the thickness of this unique layer. The evidence shows that the process allows a thirty degree shift from the pole itself.

A natural result is to dynamically change curvature throughout the crust. In our case where the shift took place on an arc passing through the poles themselves, the maximum curvature change takes place along this arc.

We can imagine curvature as a grid square associated with any point on the crust. As this square passes over various parts of the core it is either been compressed or stretched. For example, as the region of the Indian Ocean approached and rode onto the equatorial ‘bulge’ the crust was stretched. This induced a region of extensive subsidence to accommodate this stretching. Mountains collapsed and sank thousands of feet.

On the other side of the equator the square became compressed and we have uplift of both the Tibetan plateau and the boundary range as a release mechanism.

These examples are placed in the area of maximum activity. The same thing happened on the other side of the globe impacting the Caribbean and the Andes. Africa was barely touched because the rotation centered there as it also did in the Pacific. It was the region of least curvature change.

Approaching geography with that in mind, one can look at a given piece of terrain somewhat differently. Knowing we have a recent disturbance that is slowly sorting itself out allows us to investigate a square and map movements with a new assurance and also a new conjecture. That the event mapped may not be part of a longer term continuing process. What if certain sections of the Rockies are truly recent? It is easy to figure out what is not recent, but certain terrains are good candidates for an abrupt rising twelve and a half thousands of years ago.

And I must point out an important consideration. It rocks that are millions and billions of years old got moved around just yesterday, it would still be difficult if not impossible to pin down the actual time of the event. Anything like the actual biome on top would be shattered and ground to oblivion. We really do have to find a plant trap high in the Andes or the Himalayas that can be aged. This is you must admit is a pretty tall order.

Once we make the conjecture that parts of our physical world were rearranged recently, it is not too hard to sort out areas of interest. After all a suite of weathered rock that is rotted out, did not happen recently. It took plausibly millions of years of effort. Yet a few miles away one is confronted with exposed and unrotted rock.

The coast crystalline range on the Pacific North West shows the most modest weathering that could be expected yet it is integral to the only temperate rain forest on Earth. Yet the range buts up against a deeply rotted central plateau that exhibits deeply rotted rocks. This region is arid been in the rain shadow of the coastal range. In truth we have largely the opposite of expectations although one could argue that the excessive rain of the coast has swept debris away. In fact we have argued that glaciation has scoured all these mountains out and the `effects of glaciation mask all this terrain.

The salient point here is that a lot of disturbed terrain can be convincingly written up to support either option. And I hate to say this but a lot of geological interpretive work suffers from this characteristic.

Early Agriculture in Arizona

I always enjoy watching dates been rolled back to the times that my own ideas fully support. I am comfortable that this region was influenced by Atlantean copper traders in the late second millennia BC and possibly sooner.

Here we have the rise of settled agriculture contemporaneous to the projected time of impact and outlasting it by a couple of centuries.

There is an old saying in fraud investigation to follow the money. In the Bronze Age, money was copper. Every good copper district in the Americas and elsewhere were potential sources for the raw material. The seamen came in their vessels and established trading factories and motivated the locals to produce the copper.

An echo of that mining impulse led also to the collection of gold in the Andes and South America. What woke me up was the remarkable fact that the Incas held gold reserves equivalent to several thousands of years of mining effort using indigenous methods. However you wish to recast those numbers, there was some explaining to do. The big one was why? Ignited by trader’s buying habits makes imminent sense and holding it then as a store of wealth and accepting it as taxes also makes sense. And just who were the Andean counter trades with? That those traders had disappeared while the currency system just went on and on actually works very well in the case of the Inca.

I got this out of a group called alt.archeology.moderated run by a chap who collects press clippings on archeology world wide and has been doing it for a good decade. The link to the source article got wrecked.

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient farming community at a site called Las Capas in Arizona. The settlement dates to 1200 BC-800 BC, the early agricultural period in the Southwest. The settlers at Las Capas created a system of canals now proven to be the earliest extensive irrigation system in the Southwest. These canals pre-date the Hohokam canals by 1000 years. This find has completely revised the history of organized irrigation in the Southwest. The canals were built in grids with earthen gates to regulate flow. The canals held running water 9 months out of the year. The area covers 100 acres and supported 150 people. The Las Capas people grew maize as their primary crop using popped corn to make tortillas. They gathered cactus fruit, mesquite pods and amaranth. Skeletal remains of the Las Capas people show they lived a healthy life. Circular pit houses have also been uncovered with charcoal remains used for cooking in shallow pits. They had domesticated dogs and other domesticated animals.

There are 7 other settlements nearby with evidence of canals there as well. A massive flood in 800 BC destroyed their society as the Las Capas people made attempts to rebuild the waterways and then abandoned their village.

Crustal Shift

It has been two years since I posted a copy of my chapter on the Pleistocene Conformity and my revitalization of the crustal shift conjecture previously championed by Einstein and Hapgood back in the Fifties. It is now timely to revisit the conjecture, since I am alluding to it again and again and other developments are enhancing our understanding.

I will not outline the supporting evidence which is ample and most importantly successfully eliminates contradictions and serious overreaches in our present understanding of the possibilities of the Pleistocene transition to the Holocene. It is enough to say that it works as a thirty degree pole shift to the center of present day Hudson Bay.

What I want to revisit are the two primary objections that need to be overcome if this conjecture can survive to the next level of investigation. These objections are angular momentum and crustal slipperiness. We can deal with the issue of angular momentum first.

The thirty degree shift released a balance problem created by the then present polar ice cap regime. First off, the South Pole was in the open ocean just adjacent to the West Antarctic Polar Ice cap. That placed the present day mass on one side of the pole only and with the balance of the Antarctic shifted north and carrying much less ice. The actual ice mass was somewhat less than at present but not significantly so. It is now much better balanced and is inherently more stable as the East Antarctic sheet has since grown.

The real difficulty was presented by the Northern Polar Ice Cap. Again, the bulk of the ice buildup took place on land mostly on the North American side of the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ice accumulated during the Ice Age landed again on one side of the pole. And what an accumulation! It has since added three hundred feet to the sea level and this means that this mass also altered the globe’s angular momentum on the same side of the global axis as the South Polar Ice Cap.

The key take home point is that this build up of ice changed angular momentum significantly and sufficiently to seriously load the crust should it begin to move and likely also induced a wobble. It has been conjectured by others that it had moved twice before within the past 100,000 years. I do not see that as necessary to the success or failure of the conjecture, except that recent evidence makes the deliberate nature of the last shift highly probable and such could not have taken place without clear prior histories. It is likely that the angular momentum displacement caused by the alignment of the mass of the two ice caps created a roving crust that was naturally catastrophic and naturally drove efforts to resolve it. Again, it is suggestive but unnecessary to this discussion.

The present configuration eliminated the Northern Ice Cap and has totally stabilized the crust possibly for millions of years. This ended a clear imbalance in angular momentum that had accumulated for at least a million years and likely a lot longer than that, replacing it with a well balanced Southern Cap and an unloaded Northern Cap that is a minor fraction of its peak.

Been rid of that objection we can now deal with the more serious objection. How is it possible for the crust to move at all? I also want to observe that the clear reality of plate tectonics is not an answer either. This provides completely ironclad evidence of mass transfer from one side of a continental plate to the other side. Even allowing it to be forced by heat transfer it still must overcome viscosity on an unimaginable scale. Simply put, current explanations are at best acknowledgement of the reality of the phenomenon.

Logically, plate movement and a complete movement of the crust can only occur if it is possible for a layer to exist whose viscosity approaches zero or whose contact layer exhibits friction approaching zero. That is why plate tectonics was rejected outright for seventy years until the evidence became impossible to explain away.

This deal breaker problem became resolvable when I began to take an interest in the properties of elemental carbon. Recent discoveries regarding graphene have allowed us to become even more confident.

Fundamental to this conjecture is that carbon has the highest melting point of any element and is well above the disassociation energy of any compound. That means that unmelted carbon can be dragged down to a melt layer below all the crust yet to just above the metallic core. That layer is likely at least a hundred feet thick and perhaps a lot thicker. The depth is almost one hundred mile beneath us which is really not very much.

I describe it as molten but the bulk of it is more likely in the form of graphene, now that we know that exists. This layer does have a viscosity approaching zero. We already know that from recent work on graphene, but we also know that from our understanding of diamond pipes.

A diamond pipe rockets through the crust at about seventy miles an hour, originating from this layer. They are typically eighty to a hundred feet across and yet survive the trip. This is surely possible only because they begin as pure carbon, picking up and altering material on the way to the surface. In fact, the high carbon content is necessary in order to reach the surface, but once that motion ends, the surrounding and contained rock consumes the carbon leaving a fine distribution of carbon crystals known as diamonds.

The mere existence of diamond pipes is proof of a super slippery layer between the crust and the denser metallic core, and the lack of chemical bonding at this temperature and depth assures us that that layer is actually smooth. The mere fact that a pipe loaded with liquid carbon could penetrate the crust in about sixty minutes makes the proposition of the crust shifting a few miles an hour for a few days completely feasible until it was braked by the temporary loss of the carbon layer at the equators.

Therefore, our conjecture that the moderately unbalanced crust will respond to a nudge in the right direction appears to be well founded. That it may have happened naturally a couple of times is possible but unnecessary. That human intervention triggered it appears likely but is also unnecessary. That it shifted thirty degrees is necessary to resolve a range of logical impossibilities in the geological record.

It is worth observing that the Andes and the Himalayas are on the proper axis to have absorbed the necessary braking energy while the Gulf of Mexico may have additionally subsided. Once the conjecture is accepted then a lot of interpretive evidence will spring out at us. The safest place to be during all this was the continent of Africa.

Pleistocene Evidence

My articles on the Pleistocene Nonconformity and the likely prior establishment of a developed human society for the previous several thousands of years fills a large gap in the emergence of mankind. It also recognizes that human occupation of the temperate zone was not a viable option, as any survey of ice age conditions confirm.

The population had the great coastal plains, now submerged and a couple of good zones in the Tropics.

For these conjectures to stand up and bark, there still has to be viable evidence. And in fact the evidence exists and is out there to be recognized. But without these conjectures in place and part of the mental tool box, all eyes are blind.

With these tools, it is now possible to look at old evidence and provide a superior interpretation. This will not always work, and the number of possible artifacts to be recovered decline rapidly as we go back in time. I also suggest that we should recall our own artifacts are nor surviving for very long at all and are now been vigorously recycled and will soon be all recycled unless they make it to an antique store.

As an example, my working conjecture on the presence of Bronze Age traders in the Mississippi valley has allowed a rereading of old reports whose evidentiary content could not easily have been fabricated at the time they were published and conform to established Bronze Age communities overlain on the indigenous societies. Now we need more informed eyeballs even if they are trying to prove that conjecture wrong.

There is evidence, controversial of course, from the time frames that matter and in the one place that they could be expected to exist. Scattered occurrences of unexpected artifacts have been found in mining locales. Most have a recent genesis as expected but a few simply do not.

The problem is sufficiently troublesome as to bring a whole range of aging methods into question. We are not just talking of the substantial readjustment brought to the science of carbon dating. Radioactive aging has always relied on the assumption that the process is independent of external effects.

If anything, the carbon fiasco should have cured us, but instead we actually have a situation in which the data is often fudged and ignored if it goes against prejudice. This means that although most dating is valuable, it needs to be confirmed by some form of physical method such as checking strata.

Aging is still a young science and we do not know what can alter radiometric readings although we certainly have evidence that it is possible. It is prudent to be overly cautious.

From my articles we have established that the crust shifted with the original pole migrating thirty degrees south along the longitude running through Hudson Bay. This shifted materials of the equator and led to compressive forces that lifted both the Andes and the Himalayas. It also led to a lot of additional alteration at the same time that we do not easily recognize.

One of those events may be the Columbia River basalt flows. It is actually the sort of thing that could have happened then. The studies on aging were saying that they were far older than that. And I would have been happy to simply leave it at there. Except human artifacts were then located below the basalt itself. When that happens, something has to give and ignoring the evidence is utterly unacceptable.

At which point everyone remembers that the basalts look fresh. That is also my beef about a lot of the mountains in the Andes and Himalayas and along the ring of fire. There are simply way too many surfaces defying gravity for a few million years to be very believable. If anything, the record shows an eruption of activity perhaps fifteen thousands of years ago followed be a steady settling down of such activity.

This also suggests that we should look to the Northern points of weakness and this quickly gives us the hyperactive Alaska volcanoes and Iceland by itself astride the crustal divergence rifts. Iceland likely was build during this era. The oldest rocks in Iceland are a meager 23,000 years, at least the last time I checked the literature.

It always amazes me that when you have a successful conjecture, how easily evidence falls into place. Right now we know specifically where to look.

I will make one additional comment. The early proponents of a crustal shift including Hapworth and Einstein opened the door to a couple of additional shifts which I dismissed as unlikely. With the advent of direct human causation, additional shifts become feasible and simply may have been necessary to achieve the final configuration that has given us the Holocene.

This is just a beginning. There are many reports out there that have been shelved that suddenly make a lot of sense if we are using my conjectures. If you see something in an odd location that I should see, let me know.