CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the past few years, the public has become well aware of the revolution in oceanography, a major element of which was the uncovering of an immense integrated global fracture system. It is a kind of reverse harness which works from the inside instead of the outside to control natural behavior around the world. The question is whether the harness emerged from deep within or whether the globe was harnessed by an exoterrestrial force. Except in westernmost North America, in East Africa and the Near East, through Iceland and Central Asia, through the Adriatic-Rhine River rift, and beneath India, the fractures course below the sea, where they are rendered visible by the ridges running alongside of them. Many years ago, De Lapparent and Howard Baker had recognized the oceanic rifts and called them recent, while Heer had assigned the boundaries of the Mediterranean to the era of the drift [1] .
The system is worldwide. It may be said to begin in the arctic region, moving south from both sides of Greenland. It shoots down to the antarctic region, forks west and east, and forks again north and east. The east fork traverses the South Pacific and rises northwards when it strikes South America, proceeding up to and around the North Pole where it is reconnected with the northward fork that has shot up through the Asian continent via the Persian-Indian coast, Lake Baikal, and northern Siberia. There it probably connects with the fork around Greenland, completing a circuitry of the globe. Less apparent is a worldwide rupture that carries through the East-Central Pacific, Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South Asian areas, possibly a fracture along the line of the old Tethyan Sea equatorial belt.
The present globe does not portray the original situation. A Pangean globe would show nothing but land and shallow seas. Today's named areas stood unbroken. The globe then was without ocean basins. Its main body of water was the Tethyan Sea, corresponding to the present Caribbean, Mediterranean, and trans-Pacific northern tropical region. This was the equatorial region. The South Pole was bounded by lands now disappeared, unless New Zealand and a few other continental areas are remnants of them. The continents of South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica were far to the North, and part of the Pangean land mass.
The fracture originated at the old North Pole and proceeded rapidly towards the old South Pole, bending as the north geographical axis of the globe shifted to the northeast and as global rotation slowed and resumed. The globe must have jerked suddenly as the Atlantic cleavage passed through what are now the Brazilian and African humps, and then resumed its more direct southerly course.
The polar ice cap is said by Weyer to have shifted its position by 10 to 15 degrees along a line 60 degrees west and 120 degrees east [2] . Possibly the cap was cleaved and the rift began running; then almost immediately the Intruder began to cut its swath from the Pacific crust and staggered the Earth to a momentary pause, driving the rift eastwards in Mid-Atlantic.
When the fracture reached the South Pole, losing momentum but cleaving the Earth rapidly at the full depth of the continental crust, it veered sharply eastwards slicing through the then polar south region until it met with the westward shifting "American" continents, whereupon it veered northwards until it reached the northwestern fork of the north polar fracture. It skirted the eastern rim of the great pit of the Moon material that had been blasted up and away.
A secondary forking sent the fracture northwards shortly after the south polar fracture occurred, slicing through "Africa/ India," then, after crossing the Tethyan fracture, resumed in diminished depth its course across central Asia.
Meanwhile the initial point of rupture at the old North Pole sent a forking movement northeast and northwest, isolating Greenland. Both of these fractures joined the trans-Asiatic fracture at different points. Earlier, as the main "Atlantic" fracture encountered the equatorial Tethyan area, it incited a trans-world secondary fracture, that moved more rapidly east than west. The western Tethyan fracture cut through the continental mass then occupying the Gulf of Mexico and lost itself in the inchoate molten mass occupying the blasted crater of the fissioned Moon material. It may scarcely be perceived to end at the West Pacific Rise (rupture). The eastern thrust moved, however, through the "Mediterranean" and "Near East" then through a blast area which soon was overrun by a jumble of lands moving southwards.
Finally major rifts struck out from the Tethyan fracture north and south. On the south a Mediterranean and a Syrian fracture join the Red Sea rift and continue south across East Africa to join the proto-Indian fork. In proportion to a number of submarine fissures, this rift was a moderate addition to the world fracture system. Africans of the Rift countries retain legends of great structural changes in their land. To their stories are to be added similar Arab and Hebrew stories.
From the beginning to the end, the fracture system might have been the work of a day; geophysicist Cook speaks in terms of hours. It conceivably inspired the "Third Day", during which "God created the oceans" in Hebrew story. "And God said, 'Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear. '" [3] At the end of the day, the continents had been carved out, many islands had been sliced along the Tethyan way, the antarctic region, the arctic region and the "East Pacific" area. The continents were in motion. The Earth was girdled by chasms and ready to move and expand. Pangea was ended. The climax of chaos had passed.
Two characteristics of the world fracture system deserve much more attention than geophysicists have allowed them. Only Cook, to my knowledge, has frankly expressed what is so apparent, that the total system was the work of hours; perhaps he could utter the shocking sentences because he had won a Nobel prize for his work on explosives. That our precious globe could be treated so abruptly and cruelly is inconceivable to most people; it is like an innocent child coming upon the scene of an autopsy. Cook remarks that "there is evidence for the hexagonal structures characteristic of shock fracture..." This is no less than what many geologists have been trying to say in the "tectonic plate" school of thought and the Russian "crystal grid structure" theory that C. Bird has described, all hesitating to give voice to the necessary implications.
Cook goes on to add the clause, "but this evidence is by no means perfect." He may be saying this because he does not deal with the two essential components of the epoch-making event, the intervention of a great exoterrestrial body and the blasting of the Moon from the Pacific Basin. These elements of the scene tend to obscure what would otherwise appear as a more normal hammer fracture of a solid crystal globe in rotation.
The Antarctic continent (including the continental shelf of the Ross Sea) is steep-standing in its surrounding ocean. About half of it executes a remarkable circular tour, from 0 ° to 180 ° east. The other half presents a more jagged coastline, deeply retracted from the imaginary circumference of the eastern arc. Opposite the uniform half circle are the continental masses of the world. Opposite the retracted half of the continent occurs the South Pacific Ocean, between New Zealand and South America, where by our theory the Moon was drawn forth.
The Antarctic continent, we surmise, must have been located north and east, and its south and west side was the limit of the exploded crust. Its north and east portion was broken off from the neighboring continents by the forking of the Atlantic fracture, east and west along the circular arc, and had just been isolated to its west and south by the lunar explosions. Forced down by the fracture and up by the new abyss, it settled centrally over the new South Pole, contained there by lava flows from all directions. Its slopes are heavy with debris, indicating that the separation and explosion happened when the continent was ice-free and/ or that an ice cap, if there, melted catastrophically. The lack of fossils more recent than the Cretaceous in Antarctica seems to pose a challenge to short-term time reckoning in quantavolutionary theory. If the terminal Cretaceous was the time of lunar fission, however, the lack tends to confirm the theory. Thereafter Antarctica was isolated.
The puzzling fractures of the Pacific basin north of Antarctica invite puzzling quantavolutionary assumptions. The Nazca Ridge and its associated seamounts moving west off northwestern South America find their mirror image in the Tuamotu Archipelago far on the other side of the mid-Pacific Rise (Albatross Cordillera). Also the whole of the western coast of South America conforms in shape and fit to the same cleavage. The cleavage image is shifted southwest.
Are we seeing double? These features must have originated together. The Rise must have pulled away from South America faster than South America, impelled from the east by the Atlantic, moved to follow it. This is understandable if the Rise had no crust, but a yawning basin, to its own West; meanwhile it was being pushed reactively by its own east side lavas as these were blocked and pushed by South America.
Farther North, the Rise loses itself in the great transform fractures of what we call the Tethyan Belt and is then overriden by the North American continent which has been shifting southwest with the opening of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans.
A second matter calling for attention is the form of the fracture system: the ridges move rectolinearly with sidewise steps and with a great many perpendicular fissures. Perhaps the successive torques to which the globe was now being subjected shifted the main line of fracture. Every time there occurred a glitch in the crustal velocity of rotation, the main fracture line would shift to the East. At the new equatorial belt, a great shift to the East is observable. Several more 'glitch-points' occur before the fracture cuts through Africa-Antarctica and then, perhaps because the slowdown of rotation had terminated, the sidewise steps are no longer in evidence.
Nor are the transverse fissures any longer apparent. The long east-west fractures seem independent of the main ridge. Instead, passing now for the rest of its journey through evacuated surface, the major fracture, in its bifurcation, is accompanied by myriads outbursts of lava mountains, the seamounts. Seamounts occur in large numbers along the Atlantic ridge and in various evacuated regions of the basins. A close statistical analysis may ultimately use the seamounts as indicators of torque, time of fracture, velocity of the land masses, and other events, now quite obscure, of this period.
The striking conformity of the Mid-Pacific Ridge with the shape of South America and its passage beneath western North America persuades us that the original continental land on the east of the fracture is still there. But there exists no sial continent west of the Rise, that has any kind of morphological association with it. There is no well-defined boundary of the oceanic expansion to the west, nothing to compare with Euro-Africa on the other side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, no well-defined boundaries such as tie South America, Africa, and Australia to Antarctica. The "Circle of Fire," which marks an arc of volcanism and seismism from Southern Chile to the Aleutians and down through Japan, stops; so the Circle is not a circle and not a fitting image of the American side either. The morphology of the basin of the Pacific would be an incredible coincidence, a gross improbability, without our positing the disappearance of its entire crustal covering west of the Rise.
Attempts to produce a unified time-scale for the spreading away from the ocean ridges have not been successful. Heirtzler and his associates found that relative to the time scale for the spread of the South Pacific, the North Pacific time scale was in error by a factor of two. The principal technique employed has been potassium-argon radiochronometry. Nor do the spreading patterns moving from the ridges around the world agree on the location of the North Pole around which presumably they would evidence rotation. Still, because of similarities in the spreading pattern of widely separated regions, it is believed, and we think rightly, that the spreading of lava was a universally concurrent phenomena. The similarities, where they show a discontinuous floor-laying off of one ridge show the same off of another; such similar discontinuities connote simultaneity.
Earlier Cook (1963) had advanced evidence for the recent rupture of the continental crust that would probably have erased most of the perplexities just evidenced [4] .
1. The uplifts observable in Fennoscandia and Northeastern America "began at the same time and followed essentially the same relaxation equation. This equation, derived by Vening-Meinesz, is an exponential rise equation characteristic only of a sudden unloading of the crust followed by a normal relaxation."
2. The maximum depression at the center of the ice cap was along the seashore where presently stand Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and Labrador Sea.
3. Without the missing land in these northern areas, no great ice masses would have collected: "the ice would simply have rolled off into the sea." The seas of the region could not have existed prior to 10,000 years ago.
4. The uplift data fits into the extended fracture that thereupon moves down the Atlantic and around the world.
5. The ice stored in the ice cap is calculated as equal to providing the water that would fill the Arctic and Atlantic basins.
6. A "Great Arctic Magnetic Anomaly" defined by E. R. Hope from the magnetic remanence of crustal rocks exhibits "a surface dipole magnet in the North Pole region." One apparent pole is in Northern Baffin Island, the other offshore from Severnaya Zemlya in Siberia. These two apparent poles appear to be at one and the same location, if the two separated lands represented are pushed back together at the location of the former pole. "In other words, it would only be necessary to return all the land masses in the northern hemishpere to their original position by reversal of the process described by Du Toit [the splitting and rafting of the Arctic crust] in order to completely remove this magnetic anomaly."
Two sets of conditions governed the occurrence of the world-girdling fracture and the Earth's expansion. The first condition of fracture is an unevenly applied pressure on a shell. The shell is the Earth's surface down to a level which presently can be called the Moho discontinuity but which in the Age of Pangea was the point when the coolness of the Earth's surface disappeared into the mounting temperature of the crust and mantle, caused by primordial rising heat convection from the center, by pressure from the rocks above, by radioactive flow blocked from emission by the surface charge of the Earth, and by the greater centrifugal force of rotating material of greater density than the surface material.
The unevenly applied pressure consisted of ice caps rapidly formed in the thousand years before by falling ice and icy waters; these did not need to be melted at the equator, then raised by evaporation, then blown to the north, and then dropped again. They contributed directly to the ice cap, and to such an extent, that shortly there formed a tall mass of ice covering Pangea around its North and South Poles.
If the Earth had not had its magma sources opened up by fission, fracture and expansion, it might have been frozen completely over. Great depressions were formed in the rocks, depressions which have still not relaxed after 12,000 years. This pressure was a mechanical potential exercised around the circumference of the ice bowls. The fact that oceans did not exist permitted a much greater piling up of the ice caps, for a deep water basin cannot hold the same amount of ice.
A second condition of fracture is a formation that can be split. Millions of geological faults of the Earth attest to the potentiality of rocks for splitting and shearing. If the body to be split is spinning, the slightest delay in spin along a line of fault will drive the one side of the fault away from the other side. The centrifugal force in the Earth's rotation achieves this.
The setting up of a massive horizontal circular pressure against weaker rock and the resistance of denser and stronger rock below incline the potential event towards a split rather than an implosion or collapse. The buildup of ice will continue until the horizontal walls will give way through folding and thrusting. But the ice mountain does not thrust over because it is sunken in, with the form of a cap.
The horizontal strain to the depth of the ice cap causes a continual heat at its edges. It leaks water, but accumulates more ice than it loses. The heat augments below, too, from the pressure of the ice upon the non-basic sedimentary rock and granites below. These grease the cap undersurfaces.
If there were now to be a sharp blow upon the center of the cap, the cap would crack radially. In addition the weakened crust beneath the cap would give way. The Earth's axis of rotation would be tilted to meet the first blow; the Earth's spin would take up a new figure with an axis towards the direction from which the blow came. The fracture would leap out of the blow and race around the globe in the manner described above.
All of these conditions were fulfilled. The blow struck. The hammer could have been a lightning bolt from an Intruder from the northeast. At a distance of a million kilometers, it began to agitate the space sheath of Earth. The axis of the Earth tilted to meet it. The bolt struck the ice cap and sent radial fractures in all directions. At the same time electro-gravitational force was applied, with particular stress upon the pole, wrenching the Earth by its cap against its rotational direction. Earth's rotational velocity slowed sharply.
All lines of weakness were stressed. The Globe shuddered from the blow and fractured deeply. The eastward rotation of the Earth sent the deep fracture rushing down the "Atlantic" and "Pacific" sides to the other end of the spin, the South Pole. The Intruder swooped closer and passed over the Southern Hemisphere, the "Pacific Basin," where it flayed the Earth of half its crust, and then passed on. The crustal debris shot up into space in pursuit. Most of it turned aside and became the Moon. Some fell back to Earth, now and in the succeeding years. After centuries of a ring of debris, the Moon was fully assembled. The Earth came to see the new great light and the Sun and other planets as well.
The globe was probably spinning east before and during its exoterrestrial encounter, and the Intruder apparently approached from the northeast. Thus a swath of crust was removed that began narrowly in the North, barreled out at the epicenter of the encounter in the Pacific Basin, and continued to explode for thousands of miles until it passed into farther space. The "crater of the Moon" was elliptic in form.
Because of its possibly being remembered and because of its continental geography, the great Rift Valley of East Africa might be recalled for discussion. Viewed from the south, it appears to begin where the Island of Madagascar was detached from the African continent, proceeds north, bifurcates, resumes a unified path and leaves the continent at the Afar Triangle, thence moving northwest below the Red Sea, bifurcating once more to pass up the valley containing the Dead Sea into Syria (where it loses itself in the jumble of mountains observing the burial of the old Tethyan Sea and Tethyan welt that is moving generally west and east; the western bifurcation is questionable, but is likely to pass across the Mediterranean, up the Adriatic, beneath the Alps, and out along the Rhine graben that ends far to the northwest beneath the North Sea.
Arabia fits cleanly into Africa across the Red Sea. Why the Rift should turn northwest at this point may be explained by the westward thrusting Gulf of Aden-Indian Ocean faults, which have sent out a powerful arm in this direction, thus reinforcing each other and cutting a neat right angle around the Arabian peninsula. The narrows where the Gulf of Aden enters the Red Sea are called Bab-el-Mandeb, the straits of tears, after the legendary devastation the rupture caused. The Olduvai Gorge and Afar Triangle, whose hominid fossils have been assigned ages up to 3.5 million years, sit upon the Rift Valley, which is kilometers wide and houses its own world beneath the towering plateaus and mountains abutting it.
Opinions differ as to the age of the African rift. That it has been active in human times seems evident from legends and excavations. Its origins have been set as far back as 2.7 billion years, however, by R. B. M. McConnell, speaking most directly of the 4000 kilometer section from the Red Sea to the Zambezi River [5] . He speaks of "transcurrent movement" between more ancient shield rocks, but also of "perennial" reactivation. So eminent an authority as Flint accorded the Rift an origin in the late Pleistocene, well within our ken [6] .
If India and Madagascar were dissociated from the continent some 100 million years ago, as is currently believed, certainly the Rift would have been strongly activated then. Also, if Africa and the Americas had separated not long before that time, then, too, the Rift would have been agitated. The great platform that hovers above the Rift might represent the kind of worldwide swelling expounded earlier as an accompaniment of the general global cracking.
From the standpoint of this book, the arguments giving a long history to the Rift are worth no more or less than the arguments for long time-scales elsewhere in the world. In Solaria Binaria, which is primarily a work in astrophysics, the age of the Earth's rocks is put at less than a million years; in this work, which concentrates upon the recent reworking of the Earth's surface, we are not interested so much in the older rocks as in their recent upheavals.
In this context, we see the swift movement eastwards of the African continent and the lifting of its great southeastern plateau region as concurrent. The Rift had already happened; two masses were pulled apart in the global fracturing; but reactive pressures from the even larger fracture to the east, now below the sea, compressed the Rift and let the dropped rocks fall only a small distance before halting, trapped as they are today, covered with lakes, volcanic ash, and plains.
The Olduvai Gorge has been assigned 200 million years; it was then a late fault branching off the main faulting of the Rift. If it is so old, it becomes difficult to explain the hominid and mammal fossils protruding from its walls. They could not be cliff-dwellers; so the Gorge must be younger than they. How young they are is in question; the legends of heavy rift activity weigh upon our mind, and there is a variety of evidence that the hominids may be much younger, material that is treated by this written Homo Schizo I. The evidence extends to the Afar Triangle, a flat land-fill actually, born of the pull-out of Arabia, where related hominids are found. It also extends to the Palestinian portion of the Rift where Olduvai types of hominid sites are discoverable.
The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, we have said, seem to have been produced out of sharp lateral faulting shifting the end section of the Carlsberg Ridge of the Indian Ocean northward. This might indicate that the total area east of the Owen Fault Zone, including the African Rift-Gulf of Aden-Red Sea rift occurred at the time of or only a little later than the globe-girdling rift of which the Carlsberg Ridge forms part.
Further activities of the Rift advance into proto-historic times, particularly into the Bible. The occasion of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, including the story of Sodome and Gomorrah (see below, Chapter 29), treat specifically of the same rift. M. Blanckenhorn placed the age of the Syrian section of the Rift in the early glacial period [7] . W. Irwin retrojected the influx of magnesium salts into the Dead Sea, on uniformitarian principles, and arrived at a 50,000 year approximation of its age.
Velikovsky gives several reasons for reducing this age drastically, and estimates both the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley have an age of 5000 years. In all the disastrous effects of the biblically described destruction, a sea is not mentioned; yet when the Israelites under Moses and Joshua arrived on the spot around 3450 years ago they encountered the Sea.
The Jordan River, argues Velikovsky, had changed the direction of its flow, too. "Prior to the Exodus, the Jordan Valley was on a higher level than the Mediterranean Sea. With the rupture of the tectonic structure along the river and the dropping of the Dead Sea chasm, many brooks in Southern Palestine which had been flowing to the south must have changed their direction and started to flow towards Palestine, emptying into the southern shore of the Dead Sea." Legendary references indicate that heavy bursts of lightning were involved in the production of fire, smoke, and sulphur, whether by cosmic stream injections in which the planet Jupiter (Marduk in Babylonian, Zedek in Hebrew) is insistently implicated, or by subterranean upheaval along the rift (by no means excluding an exoterrestrial prime mover).
Allowing therefore that some of the major rifting of the Earth occurred as late as several thousand years ago, we conclude this chapter. All of the great rifts of the world are connected in time and by cause. They form a system that harnesses the world to the recent fission of the Moon. The individual histories of the sections of the world fracture system are insignificant by comparison with the common historical experience of the whole. The system functioned to balance the world by redistributing the crust and by expansion and to vent gases and heat during the process. The climactic event was tangibly sensed by the Pangean Earth days in advance; it occupied a day in establishing the new morphology of the Earth-Moon system; thousand of years were required for its major effects to devolve into the processes recognizable in the world today.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-two: Fractures and Cleavages)
1. Beaumont, op. cit., 190, 197. For Baker see the preceding chapter.
2. V S. I. S. R. 2 (1980-1) Discussed by Warlow, 34-5.
3. Genesis I: 9 and fn Oxford Annotated Bible (NY 1965), 1.
4. 40 Proc. U. A. S. A. L., part I, op. cit., 74-7, also in Prehistory...
5. R. B. McConnell, 83 Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull. (Sep. 1972), 2549-72.
6. Glacial Geology, 523; Glacial and Quaternary Geology (1971).