Charles Hapgoods Largely Forgetten Earth Crust Displacement Hypothesis, Iceages and Ancient Maps

Originally posted by WanDash
As another poster noted - I wonder more about the possibility that the polar ice-cap (or a large portion thereof) could have "slipped" into the ocean - causing a massive flood...

My bet is you're right on the money, WanDash. Geologists are already on board the dea that the "Badlands" (no topsoil to speak of) East of the Cascades in Washington State was carved out by an ice dam that broke in Canada, allowing a large amount of water to flow down the Columbia Basin and on to the Pacific.........

Now, envision about 12-14,000 years ago. The Ice Age was receding. Ice was melting. There were a number of seacoast civilizations in Japan, China, and India. Hudson Bay, an old asteroid strike, was covered with ice, too, of course, but because of its water, it acted as a heat sink. The ice over the Bay melted firs, but the surrounding land was still frozen. Have you ever seen Lake Michigan in winter? The shore has ice that is 6 to 9 feet tall, looming over the lake. Same thing happened to Hudson Bay.

Then the ice dam broke. And a whole lot of water came tumbling out of Hudson bay onto the surrounding oceans, and in a matter of hours the sea level rose. It rose enough to send coast dwellers scrambling, and it rise wnough to cover a few buildings completely. Indeed, if you dive on the coast of Japan, there they are. In India it's a lot more dangerous, but they are there, too.

Noah's Flood. Just like that. Was there an ark? Of course not--a fanciful tale, but the flood memory lives on in ancient myth the world around, in culture after culture, a simple matter of a waning Ice Age, not the wrath of God.

Originally posted by schuyler
...Indeed, if you dive on the coast of Japan, there they are. In India it's a lot more dangerous, but they are there, too.
...

What do you mean - it's more dangerous off the coast of India?
Have you been diving in either of these places (Japan &/or India)?

By the way - I did spend a winter on the shore of Lake Michigan... Don't know how/if it has changed since the late 1970's, but...got a nice bit of frostbite (or - some severe cousin thereof) on one of my ears, that pained me constantly for the next couple of decades (just pokes me once in a while nowadays).

Originally posted by WanDash

Originally posted by schuyler
...Indeed, if you dive on the coast of Japan, there they are. In India it's a lot more dangerous, but they are there, too.
...

What do you mean - it's more dangerous off the coast of India?
Have you been diving in either of these places (Japan &/or India)?

Based on first hand reports by Graham Hancock, who has been diving in both these areas. He reports the Indian location as particularly trecherous and difficult. Fishermen there have reported their nets snagged on underwater buildings and that, when conditions are just right, you can see their reflections from below the surface.

See Underworld for details.

By the way - I did spend a winter on the shore of Lake Michigan... Don't know how/if it has changed since the late 1970's,

Great Lakes?

Originally posted by NoExpert
Exactly right. Whilst the temperature of the mantle is not hot enough to melt the rocks at about 700km or closer to the surface, beyond this point and at 'normal' conditions it would certainly be sufficient to produce a melt. The fact that this is not the case is due to the enormous pressure and lack of water. Water is thought to be essential for plate tectonics as it lessens the temperature required to produce a melt from the solid mantle and in effect allows for the lubrication of plates. Without water the plates would literally grind to a halt.

"Water is thought to be essential for plate tectonics" .... who thinks that? Saline or normal?

I don't think the scientific evidence supports this assertion.

Water--in the form of pore fluid (bearing in mind that our concept of water breaks down at certain temperatures, concentrations of minerals, and locations (such as between grains)--is somewhat necessary to lubricate rocks moving due to tectonic stresses. As far as plate tectonics goes, the issues become far more complex. I know the MoHo Discontinuity exists, but as for its nature I genuinely don't know.

I DO know that temperature and pressure increase with depth, and any water stuck between the crust and the mantle (ie, any water that could possibly be lubricating the plates) would be far, far beyond boiling and under so much pressure that any crack or weakness would allow it to explode.

There's evidence of such a thing. Felsic volcanoes, such as Mount Saint Hellenes, cause so much devastation for exactly that reason (well, to a large degree)--water in the magma hits the cooler, less-pressurized air and it effervesces like a soda bottle after driving over a washboard road (trust me on that one). We know that there ARE such weak areas in the crust: we call them "oceanic ridges" and "black smokers". Since they're not exploding (and even the pressure of the ocean won't be enough to stabilize the water in the magma), we can conclude that there's not significant amounts of water in the MoHo.

The other argument that is no doubt going to be brought up is seismic data.

Don't get me started on that.

Well, actually please do, might learn something interesting

I'm not a fan of that data being much more useful than proving how the surface and very top crust of the Earth vibrates and interacts, I think when seismologists start wishful thinking about some of these waveforms from surface readings and theorizing what they may mean, it's basically a posteriori curve fitting of observed data to try to prove what they want to be true, not what they can actually scientifically prove is true, thus such data could have been ascribed nothing more than a seismologists hunch 40 years ago about what he guessed was going on inside the Earth, and henceforth the same data is ascribed a causation that becomes widely accepted in the field, yet no independent methodologies can verify it.

Even if the bell curve is perfect, or statistical significance very high, if those surface seismic waves are being caused by, say, any unrelated periodic event inside the earth, lets say ... between huge exploding chambers of liquid/gaseous metahne/solvents/oil reservoirs once a periodic pressure is breached and and ignition mechanism is attained in the chamber, boom. There goes that seismologists fantasy. Or .... whatever the data was used to explain before.

The Earth is about 8000km thick. We have gone about 10km deep industrially, and for scientific tests only about 6-7. thats 0.1% in, less than the skin on an apple.

The pressure gradient on the immediate surface seems to obey Newton.

But 99.9% of the physics, even the internal gravitational properties of how mass works, in a charged rotating plasma state, are not known.

The assumed universality of many laws of physics we take for granted as being so unquestionably accurate above the surface of the Earth, and in the rest of the solar system, may behave totally different.

If I say that particles 20km under the surface of the Earth exert a force greater or less than those at the center, you can not, scientifically, disprove that. Likewise, I can't prove it either.

Just making the point that this theory is very far from being falsified or pseudoscience, by any means. Even if it's not the most likely theory in town, and currently lacks an initiation mechanism, it's very much still alive and still kicking. Even if largely forgotten by the establishment.

You still did not really explain how the inner more hotter mantle/core regions (plausibly more fluid like, with plasma properties too I expect) can be fluid enough, and convective enough, to form a dynamo and generate Earths huge magnetic field.

Crikey, Jupiter is hundreds of times the size of Earth as a planet, with far more chaotic weather and turbulence evident, it's made of moving gas and an array of more exotic non newtonian fluids and solids the further in you go, and its magnetic field is only 14% larger (proportionally) than ours.

Somethings gotta be moving pretty quick and fluid like under magneto-hydrodynamic based processes to be generating that.

I think this theory has great intuitive strength in many disparate areas, but no really convincing argument can be made in one specific discipline with concrete evidence, so the problem is a lot of scientific disciplines will have to disregard some of their current best theories as silly mistakes. There is a certain amount of pride and ego gets involved here.

The carbon and state of the atmosphere hypothesis for warming may have been overestimated.

Paleontologists will have to revise the theories they developed to explain the odd placement of all sorts of exotic fossils totally out of their normal climate around the world.

Historians would have to conseed that they have started human history from a much later epoch than technical intelligent cultures likely evolved.

Proponents of the excited dynamo theory of the Earths magnetic field will have to reconsider how the Earths mass can move yet the dynamo and orientation of the field stays put (even if it can flip and wander, in addition to crustal slips)

It also touches on biological evolution in varying climates, the plasma physics of the magnetosphere and surrounding solar wind, and questions some assumptions in seismology

So I think that the dilemma we have here is that, if true, most scientists are simply not going to believe this theory until it actually physically happens under their feet!

Some might even deny it then.
If so I'll buy them an invitation to the flat Earth society so help them meet more of their kind.

Even though there are all sorts of things you can point to as data points in support of this theory around the globe, there remains a great deal of wishful (resentful*) thinking behind this theory, and the one thing that it lacks is an initiating mechanism.

I had an idea about a radial frictionless breaking point sometimes forming inside the Earth, as there's now considerable evidence that a super-hot dense plasma, like can form under certain conditions inside Earths interior, becomes basically frictionless, just like a superconductor (superheated plasmas, by definition, have nearly an infinite conductivity and practically 0 electrical resistance)

The problem with this is that the convection currents emanating from the core would always perturb a smooth spherical frictionless layer forming for crustal slip to happen.

the only way the frictionless layer could become spherical enough would be for the convection and moving of the molten mantle and core to stop and settle for a while, which, is next to impossible to happen as far as our understanding of the Earths core work.

Meh.

* Add for equality of perspective **

** And so I could double star a star point too.

Originally posted by schuyler
Based on first hand reports by Graham Hancock, who has been diving in both these areas. He reports the Indian location as particularly trecherous and difficult. Fishermen there have reported their nets snagged on underwater buildings and that, when conditions are just right, you can see their reflections from below the surface.

See Underworld for details.

By the way - I did spend a winter on the shore of Lake Michigan... Don't know how/if it has changed since the late 1970's,

Great Lakes?

Will probably look into the book...
Yes - Great Lakes...marching along the lake's shore through the some of the coldest weeks of a very cold winter... A lot of ice on that shoreline.