CHAPTER 10
BLOBS WITH TAILS

   
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If I am going to create a theory that says that the antipodal impact effects of a very large cosmic impact will cause the formation of uplifted continents in the shape of "a blob with a tail", then I should be prepared to produce examples of this condition.

Furthermore, I should be prepared to explain shapes that do not meet the criteria I have described.

On the one hand, someone could argue that, with enough leeway, a person could argue for any continental shapes that he might come up with … especially in a combination continent. Furthermore, a "blob with a tail" is a pretty elastic geological structure. A lot of different variations can fit into that model.

However, we don't end up with any blobs with two or three tails. There are no hourglass blobs. And we don't come up with any with no tails (at least not without a solid explanation — i.e. Australia and Eastern Antarctica), except for the combination continent of Asia and the very-tricky-but-finally-explained continent of North America in Appendix IV.

Reality is messy. Not every continent is going to have a perfect "blob with a tail" form. But the form will still be clearly identifiable.

First, I should note that the definition of a continent includes the area of the continental shelf, not just the area that happens to be above sea level at this moment in time.

South America is the prototypical blob with a tail. Not all continents are going to be as clear an example of this structure. But South America exemplifies the look.

Africa is another fairly easy example of a blob with a tail. However, the blob looks rather flattened … until we remember that part of the African plate is on top of the Matterhorn in the French Alps (as famously illustrated in a documentary shown on the History channel). The African plate (and, in this case, the continent) extends up through the Mediterranean Sea into the southern part of Europe, itself. It also includes the Arabian Peninsula. Once this is understood, the blob shape is more what we would expect.

Actually, we also have to consider the shape of Africa along with the part of Africa that was uplifted and separated into South America. Not all of South America came from Africa. The west coast of South America came from the ocean floor, which is why we have so many ancient sea life fossils found in the Andes.


COMBINATION CONTINENTS

Now we come to combination continents. North America is a combination continent with at least two separate uplifted bodies involved. It appears that one entity came in from the northeast and fractured the existing continent. There is no clear picture that we can draw from this ancient happening.

At least this was the best that I could make of it at first. However, after close examination over the past year, I have figured out that the Chicxulub impact moved most of the original tail of Eastern North America to the south and west. Appendix IV provides a detailed explanation.

Antarctica is another combination continent. It consists of a relatively new, small western blob with a tail and a larger, older eastern "half-blob" that separated from the original Australian continent. As the Standard Theory notes, the northern section of Eastern Antarctica fits right into the Great Australian Bight, where it used to be joined.

Australia is a shattered continent. Half of its blob is now Eastern Antarctica. Part of its tail was stolen by the rise of India and the rest of its scattered tail consists of the islands between Australia and Indochina, except for the Indonesian islands (which is an island arc formed by the Chicxulub antipode's hotspot).

This leaves us with Eurasia, which is a mega-combination continent. It not only contains the Indian continent and the Siberian continents (as described in Chapters 8 & 9), but it also contains the folded remains of many other continents. In many ways, Eurasia is the graveyard of old continents, as they are swept up by the subduction process and aggregated over time into this amorphous monster continent (see Chapter 11 for more details on this process).


THE BASICS OF IMPACTS & CONTINENTS

Most of the continental masses are so old that clues about their formation are going to be very difficult to uncover. However, there are several suppositions that we can make about the continents and the impacts that caused them.

These are:

1. CONTINENTAL FORMATION — Continents are created at the antipodes of really big cosmic impacts, not through some other process.

2. CONTINENTAL SHAPE — Continents are created in the shape of "a blob with a tail" by the directional hydraulic pressure exerted on the mantle by a really big cosmic impact.

3. CONTINENTAL LOCATION —- Continents are formed at and near the antipode of a really big cosmic impact, with the "blob" being centered just beyond the antipode.

4. CONTINENTAL COMBINATION — Continents tend to clump together as a result of the "subduction machine" which gradually subducts the ocean between them until they combine (more in Chapter 11).

5. CONTINENTAL BREAK UP — Combination continents break up because the transfer of cosmic impact energy drives new continents smashing into old combinations and breaks them up (much like the cue ball will break up a rack of numbered pool balls on the opening break). Subsequently, the "subduction machine" will bring the continents back together.

NO! The combination continents stay together until they are torn apart by impact effects, as we see in the cases of Old Australia, South America and Eastern North America. However, the subduction machine will eventually bring things back together.


6. CREATION AND DESTRUCTION — Continents have been created and destroyed over the billions of years of the existence of the Earth. In just the last 250 million years, we have seen

a. India created

b. Australia broken apart

c. Siberia created (see Appendix I)

d. Siberia starting to be pulled apart with the rift at Lake Baikal

e. India and Siberia smashing into Eurasia and adding to the size of that landmass

f. Western Antarctica created (see Appendix II)

g. Western Antarctica moving to combine with Eastern Antarctica (formerly part of Australia)

h. Eastern North America created (see Appendix IV).

i. South America created (see Appendix III)


Imagine the continental creation and destruction that preceded these events, back when cosmic impacts were even more prevalent.

7. IMPACTS HAVE DIMINISHED — Impacts are not as big or as frequent as in the history of the early Earth, but they are still big enough to wipe out the entire human race (see Chapter 11).

8. REGULAR IMPACTS — The history of major and minor cosmic impacts (32 confirmed Earth craters of more than 20 km in size in the past 500 million years17) shows that impacts have not gone away. They keep coming back.

Michael Rampino of New York University developed a theory called the Shiva Hypothesis to explain the continued assault of cosmic objects on the Earth and the other solar system planets.



The Shiva Hypothesis
"says that gravitational disturbances caused by the Solar System crossing the plane of the Milky Way galaxy are enough to disturb comets in the Oort cloud surrounding the solar system. This sends comets in towards the inner Solar System, which raises the chance of an impact. According to the hypothesis, this results in the Earth experiencing large impact events about every 30 million years (such as the Cretaceous - Tertiary extinction event).

However, mass extinctions do not show any (statistically significant)
periodicity." 23


Even though the Shiva Hypothesis doesn't stand up to strict statistical analysis, this problem could easily be explained by random variation of the orbits of perturbed comets and meteors. The cause could be happening every 30 million years, just like clockwork, but the results might appear random due to the huge variation in the paths of the agents.

Furthermore, the sample size of major extinctions (six) is extraordinarily small. It is difficult to expect much statistical confirmation from a sample size this small. And expanding the criteria to include minor extinctions just adds more uncertainty in data (i.e. We can't be sure that the Triassic extinction was even an extinction, so what kind of doubts will there be about minor extinctions? Also, we are finding new big and small craters all the time … the completeness of this project is far from finished).

The Shiva Hypothesis is quite appealing. But, even if it is wrong, we are still left with a continuing geological history of impacts (major and minor) and extinctions (major and minor).