Gravity and a Single Continental Landmass

[peterfc]

Gravity and a Single Continental Landmass

Two of the best known and yet rarely acknowledged problems faced by scientists investigating the history of Earth are possibly related. It is universally accepted that Earth’s continents were once a single landmass; indeed, it is suggested that Earth’s continents may have come together as a single landmass and subsequently broken apart 3 times. However, there seems to be no generally accepted mechanism for either the assembly or the breakup of single landmasses or any suggestion for a source of the forces needed to cause their assembly or breakup. The other, possibly related problem that everyone would appear to acknowledge, but have no explanation for, is the necessity for Earth to have experienced much reduced gravity for the dinosaurs to grow to the massive size their fossilised remains prove they did. For the dinosaurs to have evolved to the giant sizes they did, the gravity they experienced would probably have been no more than one third of Earth’s current gravity. Could this reduced gravity have been experienced when the Earth had a single continental landmass?

The difficulty about reduced gravity is not confined to the distant past. Excavated carcasses show that during the lifetime of mankind, mammoths and mastodons grew to almost double the size of any modern elephant whose size is limited by Galileo’s square / cube law. Under this law, as the size of an animal increases, its relative muscular strength is severely reduced, because the cross section of its muscles would increase by the square of the scaling factor while its mass would increase by the cube of the scaling factor. Cardiovascular and respiratory functions limit the size that any animal can grow to and, at the current time, the largest elephants are close to that limit. This means, given the known size of the largest mammoths and mastodons, that only a few thousand years ago Earth must have experienced lower gravity to that now experienced.

Any explanation for how Earth experienced reduced gravity when the dinosaurs grew to the massive sizes they did, must also be able to account for the evolution and the subsequent extinction of the much more recent giant mammals.

Galileo’s square / cube law is rarely taught at schools, because every 10 year old would know that the size of dinosaurs proves that something they were being taught is wrong; somehow, gravity must have been lower in the past.

Dwardu Cardona in his book, God Star, maintained that early memories of mankind tell of a time when Saturn was alone in the heavens; ever visible in the northern sky. This, he said, was before the birth of the Moon and before the subsequent sightings in the heavens of the Sun, Jupiter and finally, Venus and Mars. Assuming Cardona was right about Saturn being alone in the heavens, could the giant mammals have evolved in reduced gravity while Earth was in a close 2 body relationship with Saturn with its northern hemisphere locked facing Saturn?

In a 2 bodies system the gravities of Earth and Saturn, in the situation we are considering, would effectively balance one another out at Lagrange Point 1, the greater gravity of Saturn being cancelled out by the centrifugal force created by Earth’s mass and angular momentum. This can be expressed as a formula where G is gravity, assuming it to be a constant for this exercise, Me is the mass of Earth, Re the radius of Earth, Ms the mass of Saturn, Rs the radius of Saturn and d the distance between the centre of mass of Earth and the centre of mass of Saturn. From this formula we can arrive at another to give a multiple of the radius of Saturn that the 2 planets must be apart for any chosen reduction in gravity at the surface of Earth which is located at d – Re. If Lagrange Point 1 between Earth and Saturn had been located at the surface of Earth, gravity at the surface would have been zero.

Assuming, at the time of the dinosaurs, the masses and radii of Saturn and Earth were as they are now, their separation would have had to have been around 7 times the radius of Saturn for Earth’s gravity to be only one third of its current level. The assumption that gravity is a constant and that the masses and radii of Earth and Saturn were as they are now means that any solution must be questionable, but the methodology is valid. An orbit this close is not impossible, planets have been discovered that are orbiting closer to their primary than this. As centrifugal force would have been involved in the balancing of the gravity of Saturn, the southern hemisphere of Earth as well its northern, would have experienced reduced gravity; hence the evidence of giant dinosaurs living everywhere on Earth.

Clearly only a major catastrophe, possibly caused by the approach of another star, could have thrown Earth out of its locked orbit of the cosmic body that drew all its landmass into a single continent. This, of course, may not have been Saturn; there are 3 other gas giants in our solar system, all of which may once have been stars. Once thrown out of its close orbit, changes in the centrifugal and gravitational forces experienced by Earth’s molten mantle material would have caused the single continent to break-up and its various separated parts be redistributed more equally over Earth’s surface. The increase in gravity when Earth was no longer in a close orbit of its giant neighbour, would have killed off all but the smallest dinosaur species.

If Cardona’s Saturn theory is right, after an undeterrable time orbiting at some distance from a heat giving star, Earth was captured once again in a close 2 body relationship with a much larger cosmic body; this time unquestionably Saturn, with Earth’s northern hemisphere locked facing its giant neighbour. When first captured in this new relationship, Earth’s molten mantel material and its continental land masses would have been drawn to the north with new mountain ranges created where the continental plates crashed together. Assuming that Earth’s gravity had to have been at least 20% less than at present to be low enough for mammoths and mastodon to grow to almost double the size of a modern elephant, the separation between Saturn and Earth may have been around 20 Saturn radii.

Clearly a serious catastrophe must have thrown Earth out of this Cardona suggested locked relationship with Saturn within the lifetime of mankind. Cardona explained his ideas about this catastrophe at the SIS 1999, Easthampstead conference, the proceedings of which can be read in C & C Review 2000. For further ideas about this catastrophe see - Birth of the Moon, C & C Workshop 2007:2.