Author: Ted Holden The basic Holden article on dinosaur enigmas, in its entirity, was feat
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Author: Ted Holden
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The basic Holden article on dinosaur enigmas, in its entirity, was
featured in a recent issue of The Velikovskian. It was very well
received from all indications. Among the comments which came back was
one letter which I found particularly interesting; it read, in part:
"Are you aware of the "expanding earth" theory, which is an
alternative to continental drift? In 1983 H.G. Owen published "Atlas
of Continental Displacement, 200 Million Years to the Present" in the
prestigious Cambridge Earth Science Series of the Cambridge
University press (England). It is a book of maps that shows how the
continents looked at various intervals in the past beginning 200
megayears ago. In Owen's words:
'In 1976 I presented a spherical geometric analysis of the bulk of
the ocean floor spreading made available up to 1974. During this
task, it was found that the continents would only fit together to
form Pangea, according to geological evidence, when the Earth's
diameter was 80% of its modern mean value. Below that figure,
Pangea could not be reformed without intra-continental
dislocations. Above that figure, gores appeared in the
reconstructiond.'
"This should reduce "g" by at least 20 percent. Actually, Owen was
carrying on the work started by S. Warren Carey in his book, "The
Expanding Earth", published by Elsevier in 1976 in their Developments
in Geotectonics series. Later a symposium entitled "The Expanding
Earth" was held at the University of Sydney in Australia Feb. 10-14,
1981 and sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science and the
proceedings were published under that title. In 1988, Carey
published "Theories of the Earth and Universe" through the Stanford
Univ. Press. In this book he advances the theory that matter is
being created in the center of the earth and that is why the earth is
expanding - I've talked to several physicists about this and they see
no problem with it. I'm not in a position to make an independent
judgement."
"However, if the earth is expanding and Carey is right about the
cause, the new material could well be as heavy as iron or heavier and
the change in "g" could be more than the 20% that I roughed in. I
wrote to Carey several years ago and I'm not sure that he's still
alive, but I plan to send him a copy of Holden's paper...
"... You might want to send a copy to Owen, who is in the Department of
Paleontology at the British Museum (Natural History) London."
Another conundrum it seems. Neo-catastrophists, including David
Talbott, Lynn Rose, and a number of others can, of course, can do a bit
of a better job of explaining this one, without the semi-miraculous
requirement of continuous creation of matter in fact.
The Spring 91 issue of the Aeon journal, which concerns itself with
the nature of the antedeluvian world, carried an article by Lynn Rose
on the subject of the former supercontinent, Pangea.
Rose noted several glaring problems with this arrangement, and
suggested a novel way of solving them. The problems included:
1. That the continents were all clumped into a single mass in the first
place. No force exists at present which might ever draw them all
together, and the odds of them all merely drifting together for no
reason are greater than 64 - 1, which would be the odds against them
ever merely appearing in the same hemisphere for no real reason.
2. If, as seems overwhelmingly likely, some force drew the continents
into one place, then that force should have drawn them into a circular
mass. The sea of Tethys is an anomaly, which clearly does not belong in
the picture. The picture of Pangea looks, in fact, like a pie with one
wedge (the Tethys Sea) missing; sort of like a pac-man with its mouth
open.
3. Given uniformitarian views, if we assume the system to be 7 B years
old, our earth should have been in equalibrium even 200 M years ago. If
some force existed then to draw the continents together into Pangeae,
and if that force were terrestrial, then clearly Pangeae should still
exist. The relatively minor catastrophes which establishment science
presently allows for as per the case of the Alverez version of the
dinosaur extinctions should by no means have broken up Pangeae.
4. India starts out on one shore of the Sea of Tethys and moves to the
other. According to current theory, again as per "Continents Adrift",
India can barely make it over that distance even in the greatest version
of the allowed time involved; it should be on the ocean floor. Rose
goes into some detail on this point.
Rose mentions one other very major problem with continental drift theory
which is more properly a part of another article. Rose derives evidence
that two prior ages have existed, one, the so-called "Age of Cronus" of
the Greeks and Romans during which the felt effect of gravity was
heavily attenuated by the different planetary allignment, and a prior
age, that of Pangeae, during which the effect was even more
pronounced. During both ages, the earth was egg shaped, considerably
more so in the age of Pangeae.
Rose's solution to the aforementioned problems: imagine a half of a
grapefruit skin sitting atop a basketball (our egg-shaped world), and
then inagine that a catastrophe occurred during which this felt effect
of OTHER gravity, from the small-star or large planet(s) was reduced,
which amounts to imagining that somebody pushed the half grapefruit skin
down atop the surface of the basketball, thus forcing it to lie atop a
surface of lesser curvature. The skin of the grapefruit half would
split into something very like the Sea of Tethys.
What Rose is saying is that the Tethys Sea never existed, or existed
only for a short period of time after the split and breakup of Pangea,
and that we are only forced to imagine it's having existed by our
insistence on believing that the world was always round as it is now.
One notes that this notion of Pangea sitting atop the high part of an
egg-shaped or eccentric Earth neatly solves the problems of Owen, Carey
et. al.
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Lynn Rose mentions one final problem involved with continental
drift theory, and this involves the present fits of the Red Sea
shores and the shores of the Gulf of Aden. Both fits are quite
good; you can join the shores of the Red Sea, or of the gulf, BUT
ONLY ONE AT A TIME; if you join the shores of the Red Sea, the
shores of the Gulf will be open by about 20 degrees, and vice-
versa. Basically what you have is like two letter "V"'s connected
at their vertices, one something like 110 degrees and the other
something like 90. This ammounts to a dilemma on the map of the
world. Given our earth as it presently exists, such a split could
not happen.
Lynn Rose presents evidence for the existence of two prior ages;
the evidence involving Pangea involves a long distant and remote
age, posssibly the age of the seizemosaur and other really gigantic
beasts. The evidence involving the Africa/Arabia split involves a
much more recent and historical age, the time of the Greek Golden
Age and of the biblical antediluvians.
Lynn Rose sees in this evidence an indication as to the actual
location of the mythical garden of Eden, the home of Adam and Eve,
and the way in which all of this fits together is interesting.
I do not claim to know what is meant by claims of
Adam and Eve having been the first two people. It is possible that
God actually created them as written, it is also possible that
prior people more closely resembled bears or gorillas or
neanderthals, and that "first people" once meant something more
like "first such as us". Possible also is "first caucasians"...
who knows. But too much is written of Adam and Eve and in too many
places to lightly regard them as mythical figures. In many of
these sources, we find mentioned a "holy mountain"; it is written
that Adam and Eve and Seth and Seth's descendants lived upon the
holy mountain, and that Cain and his descendants descended and
began to live below.
Lynn Rose, of course, has given us an indication as to what the
"holy mountain" might have been, basically, the high part of the
egg-shaped world which existed prior to the great flood.
Rose proposes the world mountain (of the age of Kronos) to have
been based within the Afar Triangle. He proposes something akin to
a half a grapefruit sitting atop a basketball (for the purpose of
conceptualization and not necessarily to scale) as having been the
former situation, and then (when the whole thing fell at the end of
the golden age), surface splitting would occur with the skin of the
half grapefruit being suddenly forced to lie flat upon the surface
of lesser curvature. If two such splits thus occurred, as easily
might happen, then you would see just such an impossible split as
we see between Africa and Arabia now.
Rose states that rough figures show an earth eccentricity between
.3 and .4 and a world mountain of several hundred kilometers height
being needed for the African, East African, and Arabian plates to
fit, closing the rift valley and other problems along with the
afore-mentioned Red-Sea/Gulf-of-Aden anomaly.
Climbing our present mountains is tough enough; climbing up or
down a mountain such as Rose describes would be a major-league big
deal. Does literature record any such notion? In "The Forgotten
Books of Eden" Bell, (ed. R.H. Platt Jr.), pp 76 - 78 we find:
"But then Genun [of the children of Cain living below]
gathered together companies upon companies, that played on
horns and on all the other instruments that we have already
mentioned, at the foot of the holy mountain, and they did so
in order that the children of Seth who were on the holy
mountain should hear it.
But when the children of Seth heard the noise they wondered
and came by companies, and stood on the top of the mountain to
look at those below, and they did thus for a whole year...
...Then the children of Cain looked up from below, and saw
thge children of Seth standing in troops on the top of the
mountain, and they called to them to come down to them.
But the children of Seth said to them from above, " We don't
know the way"...
I should also mention that the capital of Yemen, opposite the Afar
Triangle which Rose cites as the former location of this holy
mountain, is called Aden. It thus appears that Adam and Eve and others
of the antedeluvians such as remained with them and their descendants
through Seth, lived in the vicinity of the Afar Triangle and of the city
of Aden.
The Age of Kronos and the age of Pangaea do not appear to have been
the same. The Red Sea/Gulf of Aden splits were recent, Pangaea a
bit less recent. Rose mentions that the same construction he uses
to explain the Africa-Arabia fit will also work for Pangaea, thus
solving problems 2 and 4 by eliminating any need for a Sea of
Tethys in continental drift theory, but that the world mountain
you'd need would be larger, over 1000 km, with Earth's eccentricity
between .5 and .7.
Before I lose track of it, I should also mention that Rose's novel
method of accounting for the splitting of continental plates, i.e. the
notion of a curved surface being forced to lie upon a world which is
suddenly less curved, will also account for a couple of other anomalies.
Mountains are generally thought to arise when continental plates collide
or shift over and under eachother, and yet we have cases of mountains,
such as the Urals, where nothing of the sort shows any evidence of ever
having occurred. Rose states that a highly curved surface suddenly
forced to lie upon a surface of lesser curvature, aside from splitting
as we have seen, could also wrinkle, thus forming mountains.
E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank
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