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.
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.
